There has been plenty of discussions about a hybrid BA/Project Manager role, but is it the same for agile developments also? Is it possible, or a good idea to have a hybrid BA/Scrum Master role and is there any trend towards this?
GK:
Especially for more complex systems (and business systems, from my expereince are always complex), in order to have an adequate idea of what the requirements are, someone needs to create an Agile big picture (a big picture that captures the essential behavior of the system to be - and only the essentials). BA's are (or should be) charged with coming up with this bigger picture. With this bigger picture, the project can be properly scoped and decomposed. Once the project is properly decomposed and the interfaces between essential components are determined, priorities are easy to determne.
Once you have all of the above, don't sweat the details - SCRUM becomes duck soup. Without the above, the typical project "yankum, crankum, and spankum" prevails, and there is often no logiic as to who does what.
Tony
Generally the scrummaster role can be anyone on the team. Depending on the context the role may need to be full time.
If you are a new agile team you will have lots of work distilling requirements and communicating with stakeholders. You may want to make the IM someone else if you only have on BA.
On the other hand, of the question is "Does a good BA have the skills to be a scrum master?" The answer is often yes.
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