Jonathan Babcock

A few thoughts on identifying use case actors and a job-aid that may help simplify the effort.

As I was skimming Gary Chin’s book Agile Project Management, I came across a method I liked for determining whether to use classic or agile management methods.

Not long ago, CIO.com ran an article entitled, Why Business Analysts Are So Important for IT and CIOs. The article has apparently piqued the interest of many business analysts as I’ve seen it mentioned in various blogs and discussion groups.

It is exciting that reliable research firms like Forrester are producing reports such as this that acknowledge the value of the BA role and provide such a positive outlook.

I wanted, first, to point out the article to those of you who may not yet have read it; second, to share some of my own commentary on passages that I found particularly interesting. So, here we go:

I’ve long been of the opinion that involving as many stakeholders in the project as early as possible is a key to successful business analysis, and, more importantly, to successful projects, and have said as much in a few of my posts on this site.

Jim Highsmith, in the book Agile project management : creating innovative products, thinks that the reason projects tend to have so much documentation and so few results is that:

In my business analysis group, we identify user requirements through use cases, but we don’t use user stories. As I am not extremely well-versed when it comes to some of the agile methods, I thought I’d do some research to learn more about user stores and to determine how user stories are different from use cases and from traditional requirements.

Welcome! This site specializes in providing tips and tools for Business Analysts and systems development in general. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. If you’d prefer, you can also receive my posts directly to your e-mail. Thanks for visiting!Here are some links to interesting articles and information I’ve [...]