As companies transition to Agile and Scrum to manage their software development projects, how does this affect the work of business analysts? Nancy Nee, VP Global Product Strategy at ESI International, shares her opinion on the role of business analysts in Agile software development projects and how this approach impacts the requirement gathering activity. She also provides some input on how to handle conflict between stakeholders.

Sometimes, when an organization is adopting Scrum as its development model, the following unfortunate thing happens: A decision maker with authority over the team-to-be is trying to match existing people to each of the Scrum roles, and he or she thinks, "Product owner . . . well, that's obviously the customer." Wrong. In almost every case.

A common perception when working in Agile is, "Welcome changes over following a plan." In the Agile Manifesto, however, the phrases "Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage" still mean you need a plan to begin with. How can we express the product backlog so that we can easily provide enough planning information to management without compromising on Agile principles?

This article emphasizes the significance of knowledge management practices in the context of the software development industry. This also covers how knowledge conversion takes place in organizations, why organizations fail to utilize Knowledge Management in solving the business problems in long-term and how KM can be implemented effectively with best practices.

The Scrum product backlog should be ordered, not prioritized.

Stakeholders are individuals or organizations who stand to gain or lose from the success or failure of a software development project. This article focuses is on internal stakeholders within the organization and the need to prioritize between them to create the good requirements for a successful project. It presents a process for dealing with internal stakeholders and tools to help prioritizing them.

This article explores how to achieve the productivity benefits of an up-front enabling specification, given the reality that Scrum is an empirical framework in which emergent understanding of the story under development is inherent.

As Scrum practitioners know, a user story is a high-level requirement of a feature, provided from the perspective of a stakeholder who desires the new capability. These requirements enable the development and testing team to think about a solution.

Some of the most common models for collaborative requirements discovery and management in Agile/Scrum projects along with the benefits the teams obtained.

This article presents a list of business analysis and software requirements certifications currently available from different professional organizations.