Ask any questions, offer any insights, volunteer to participate. The floor is yours.

I think it's a role, since the main responsiblity of a BA is to translate business requirments into IT language

Well Ada, be sure to come along and have your say at the debate :)

Everyone will have the chance to contribute.

I think its a competency and a responsibility that everyone involved in building software should share.

Defining a role purely by a specialised set of skills tends to weaken those skills in everyone else. I think that's a major contributing factor to people drifting out of touch with the holistic view of building software. People start to not care about things that exist outside of their bay in the assembly line and that never leads to good software.

I love working with specialists who possess strong skills around a core competency but also know how to help bring everyone else's skills in that area up to a higher level. People like that are gold.

Will try to make it to the debate :)

I view Business Analysis as a competency, which is delivered by Analysts (Business / System).

I think it can be both depending on the setup of the team. In particular I have found that Business Analysis within an Agile team is much more about facilitation (competency) whereas in a more traditional team Business Analysis activities seem to have more emphasis on process and documentation.
In my experience every role and every team has a unique mix of the two, now if you were to ask which was better....

I would say neither - it is a task or set of tasks, which need a toolbox (competencies) to be able to be accomplished satisfactorily.

This is especially relevant in the Agile world as Scrum team in particular is expected to perform these tasks as a matter of course. If you look at hard core XP then there is no specific business analysis role but the analysis tasks get performed in the process.In essence, if no particular person is assigned to perform these tasks then the rest of the group steps up as required (presumably in this forum we all agree that business analysis should be performed)

Stephen +1

Even on a agile team it depends on the internal skill mix. I currently work with and have previously worked on agile teams. The BAs specialise in the client engagement although we involve the devs whenever we can, run all the project coordination tasks, help out with sql reporting & data extracts, do a bit of prototyping etc. And that's working with development teams in quite dev-centric environments. We run with a mix of traditional requirements and agile to suit the job.

Outside of development centred roles the BABOK covers off the wider competencies. In the last few years most of my work has come from projects. They've ranged through process improvement, governance framework, application and infrastructure rollouts plus of course SDLC type gigs. I've mainly worked end to end and as I've got more seniority inherited a fair bit of PM work along the way.

Looking at my BA friends I think this is fairly common experience. So I can't comment on how it looks in a purely Agile shop as I've never found one. I think a lot of the Business value of the BA role is that in a world of specialists we are generalists which is why the role has become ubiquitous.

Perhaps this may add thought to the debate.

These days, when you are looking to hire somone into a team. Do you ask for a BA or do you ask for someone with experience in something, maybe process mapping and requirements elicitation? Do you lend more weight to their job titles and qualifications or evidence of accomplishing specific tasks?

Yes, the SDLC will impact the formailty of job titles - but are we becomming consultants who are competent in business analysis or is the concept of a 'Career BA' still alive?

I suggest the topic's perspective should be reversed: what is the role of Agile Teams in relation to Business Analysis?

Why? I have worked as a BA on a lot of business projects in my time, and the vast majority were either enhancements to existing software, or ended up buying package software. All those projects needed business analysis to determine, for example, what was required of the packages, but no software development team, Agile or otherwise, was needed.

In most organizations, Agile teams should be aware that some amount of Business Analysis will have been done prior to their involvement; how are you going to make best use of that going forward?

(Hey, debates sometimes need devil's advocates...)