A Hole In The Loop

Patrick Work Related

I have been part of a production support team lately and an issue that was raised this week had me concerned about some of the state we seemed to be operating in. We had a situation where a business analyst who wrote the requirements for a particular part of the system had to keep coming back to development asking how that was part of the system was supposed to be working.

I must apologise, but I thought our current process was actually working to ensure that the development loop was tight. Testers would work with BAs to ensure that all the scenarios were covered, developers would write to meet those scenarios and the BA would walkthrough the application to ensure that all of their requirements were met before signoff (completion of the storycards). It could have just been an off-day, but it worries me when business people come to the development team to see what the business rules should be.

3 Replies to “A Hole In The Loop”

  1. I think that BA’s occasionally get bored, or feel like they’re not making their influence felt enough (maybe they feel like their job security is under threat)… so they walk over to the developers and shake the tree a little. Well, that’s my experience with BAs anyway 🙂

  2. I know what you mean about that. I think that when they do something like this though, they are shaking their own tree a bit more, indicating perhaps they’re not doing their job as they are supposed to. As I said though, it could have just been a bad day as most of the BAs are pretty good.

  3. Patrick, I know what you mean – I’ve been frustrated by this too. But on the other hand, if you were to ask me exactly how a particular piece of code worked, I’d often have to go to read it (or it’s tests) to provide a useful answer … even if I’d written it myself. People are forgetful.

    It occurs to me that BAs and business people often don’t have access to anything equivalent to code, ie. a “source of truth” that represents exactly what the software does now (because it *is* the software). Making the functional tests available to them (in a form that they can readily understand) may help.

Comments are closed.