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Book Review : The agile guide to business analysis and planning: from strategic
plan to continuous value delivery.

Article · April 2023

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Mohammad Sadegh Kayhani Pirdehi

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 Book Review : The agile guide to business analysis and planning: from strategic plan to continuous
value delivery. Podeswa H.

Dratistical evolution of the business development mechanisms, emergence of

new technologies, their increased penetration in the people’s life and business,
changing the customer behaviors, market competitions, and sever amendment in
the methods of responding to the customer needs, implicate new methods of
product development in general and software development in particular. Leveraging
incremental planning approach, agile methodology has been innovated to dominate
these circumstances and to tether its ever changing coordinates. Uncertainty of the
specifications of the products and the hazy destination of development process
dictate that the requirements should be elucidated as the project proceeds.
Although Agile provides considerable advantages for reliable development at
uncertain situations, but this capability is owed to its remarkable complexity of the
development process. With emphasize on the Business analyst (BA) role, the book
which is the accumulated experiences of its author not only provides the precise
details of the issues of agile methodology but includes significant guidelines how to
deploy that achievements for the project development.

The first three chapters of the book include reasoning about the significance of
agile analysis and planning, expressing a historical perspective and providing the
pivotal principles of agile methodology. It is explained how high degree of resilience,
adaptability, customer innovation and increased value delivery can be achieved via
agile examining of the business culture, organizational structure, process and
products. The contributions and key practices of BA in agile team as a facilitator in
all of its phases are categorized. It is emphasized that BA, would practice methods
for dividing the requirements into desirable units (stories) for implementation to
acquire best value during a short term, one or two days maximum one week, as
product backlog items(PBI).

While the uncertainty means the existence of unpredicted or non-provided

truth in a phenomena, uncertainty in requirements indicates no leanable
assumptions or predictions about the requirements. In this regard the requirements
would be estimated through learning as the project proceeds. The next four
chapters can be categorized as “Agile preparation” part of the book. The agile
methodology is supposed to be leveraged by an organization, to promote the affairs
and combat the potential issues. The proposed solutions have been classified as
“preparing the organization”. The level of maturity of organization to agile principles
and methods, In-house, outsource or partnership development of the product based
on Nickolaisen’s model, establishing the DevOps, continuous Integration and
continuous delivery (CI/CD) policy in the infrastructure, mixed competency team
arrangement along with extended team formation, financial problem preparation,
marketing and supply chain issues all and all finally should be confirmed in the
organization readiness document and its related checklist. The “process preparation”
is the key discussion of preparation. Flow-based and time-boxed treatments are
detailed, as the backlog job unit acceptance planning policies. It is explained that
job units are the abstraction of committed requirements which realize as epic,
feature or stories based on the required effort for fulfillment and abstraction level.
Agile suite is context-oriented; the process tailoring is defined: how to adapt the
agile components to the circumstance and process tuning: the mechanism to
calibrate its specifications to gain the highest performance via parameter
adjustment. Normally the preparation concluded with an agreement to the
specifications. It is expressed that, in agile, the specification definition because of
the uncertainties would be incremental and is called the visioning process. During
visioning, after extracting the issues, their pivotal topics would be discussed among
the stakeholders and finally for any defined interval and level of abstraction,
product vision statements are declared according to an initiation relying points. In
visioning, many problems are behind the estimated requirements, root-cause
analysis by cause-effect tools leveraged to extract their relations and originality.
Based on defined vision statement, product or epic vision statement would be
crafted as the initial agile operational entities. To evaluate the value of novel
products or epics, leap of faith hypotheses: the valuability criteria for the product to
be successful in the venture, would be contrasted repetitively against the minimum
viable product(MVP) experiments feedbacks as the mechanism for learning and any
discovery, change or reject enforcement.

The following eight chapters of the book can be classified as the “refinement”
part, where the aim has been focused to launch the feasible working items in a
foggy atmosphere for implementation. Epics, features and stories are subjective
concepts, the product-level work items which are supposed to be managed in the
backlog to realize the visional requirements. They are refined during the iterations
and decomposed to lower level, based on the learning. The product use cases are
the origin of appearance of the epic and features; sometimes the products are
novel and the insights about their specifications are crude, circumstance-based
marketing segmentation is introduced to find out their properties. Features are the
large granule of duties which its sequence and relative priority for implementation
can be estimated using Kano analysis and a ratio of its customer value and
approximated cost. Determination of the initial set of features, their values to
customer, their sequencing in the backlog, their decomposition to probable stories
are the pool of activities which should be performed to manage them in the backlog.
Feature acceptance criteria, concerned non-functional requirements and compliance
audit impact are discussed as well. While epics and features reflect the product-
behavior in the work flow, their refinement to cascade stories that requires a few
weeks by a team to deliver a value, is the ultimate step of decomposition. In the
preparation process, the story’s specifications are defined as the result of
commitment of stakeholders, developers and testing group in the language of the
customer. Guidance are provided how to compose well-formed stories and their
acceptance criteria (AC) using Behavior-driven development, Gherkin format. Non-
user stories, spikes, are described as the enabler stories in the supporting point for
extending the activities for the future business functionalities. The patterns are
provided to cover the splitting of stories during the iterative refinement and
adaptability. Conducting the features and stories of a product toward the
implementable machinery tasks, with the best performance and providing highest
value, with all of uncertainties and amendments issues is the key topic in agile
methodology. There is a journey from initiative ideas for definition of primitive
features to a consolidated committed one. Check list of preparation artifacts,
technical preparation (BPMN, use-case and user-role modelling), specifications of
feature acceptance criteria, persona analysis, value stream and journey map are
the milestones of an evolution which are detailed comprehensively. After the
commitment and definition of ready for the feature, it can be delivered for the
upcoming quarter backlog for planning. In the planning, with emphasize of
flexibility and adaptability over predictability the detail of functionalities and timing
consideration are committed. Collaboration mechanisms, the scope of delivered
matters, developing roadmap to gain those based on learning according to data and
changing market condition are defined. The important role of the analyst and its
duties to converge the ideas in the group are described. While creating the culture
of change in favor of promoting the business is recommended, the promise
restriction conditions are counted. Developing many kind of MVPs as the low cost
experimental version of product and creating a loop to refine the features via
learning is the next topic of discussion. MVP process would lead to validation of
features which can make the minimum marketable features (MMF).Next the story
map as a mechanism to decompose of features to stories and their sequence and
dependencies are demonstrated. The blinding MVP and Story map potentially are
powerful tools to refine the features in a lower abstraction level. After initial
estimation of stories, gradual and iterative operations, start to decompose them,
whereas the deliverables are determined at any cycle. The capacities of the
development teams according to their implementation performance are evaluated.
The next accomplishment mechanism and definition of ready, definition of done in
the story are declared and stories are decomposed at the atomic implementable
task level. The assignment of tasks to developer teams is arranged and an overall
view of implementation phase is achieved with negotiation to meet a commitment
for the next iteration. The auditing of the progress of design and implementation
are accomplished while other stories are analyzed concurrently at a daily standup
manner. The management of scope change during iteration is an important
mentioned problem which should be facilitated by the analyst. Daily burn-down
chart, burn-up charts and cumulative flow diagrams are valuable tools to monitor
the progress of implementation process. It is discussed how the acquired view of
the advancement of project in this low level development, would have impacts on
the upcoming epics and features.

The next final three chapters can be categorized as the “complementary”

part of the book. It compromise important topics of releasing, scaling and
enterprise agility. Releasing is a practice to present the software into market. It
includes the release preparation activities: possible hardening, pre-alpha, alpha,
beta (closed or open) testing mechanisms, Goal availability(GA) circumstances,
Quality retrospective and pivot or preserve meetings. While the agile original teams
structure have an integrated and hard core. In quest of methods for collaboration
and interaction among these teams in the large organization and projects scaling
agile policies demonstrate its importance. Scaling introduces the issues and
prescribes principles to smooth practices to realize the inter-collaboration among
features in a reliable and sustainable manner. Fluxing the cultural scaling habits,
 Scalability mechanisms for product backlog, sub-product, team backlog and
definition of done for scaled product are defined. In structuring a scaled agile
organization, its skeleton with definition of component, extended and competency
teams are founded. In scaled agile process, for agile organization teams, regular
meetings and tools are proposed to facilitate interconnections of routines, remedy
technical complexities and specify shared components. Enterprise agility discusses
about an organization that tries to adapt quickly, its functionalities according to
changing circumstances with continuous improvement through learning and
providing value to the customers. Tailoring the approach to the circumstances , the
impact of disruptive innovation, protection of the island of innovation, the gravity of
past success and its relation with disruptive innovation and autonomy of agile
business units and supporting aggressive innovation in enterprise agility are
detailed as the directing principles for applying agile practices. The axioms of
iterations, embracing change, acceleration disciplines, different aspects of empathy
for customers, . . . are the thirteen recommended principles to flux the agility in an
enterprise. Finally the real options which estimates the financial planning issue
under uncertainty circumstances are discussed.

The book includes worthy theoretical topics and guidelines which has
interwoven with practical experiments of the author. It is a good reference for all
the people who involve in the product development projects specially system
analysts. Lack of providing discussions about the important subject of maintenance
in agile methodology, and staying away from the techniques of software
engineering are arguable shortage of the book.

Mohammad Sadegh Kayhani Pirdehi Sep. 2022

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