During the first week of March, I co-presented on a topic about iterative and agile software development to a group of Business Analysts within the company I work for (which follows traditional Waterfall practices). It was a good presentation, and I had a great time doing it.  I wished there was more time to field questions, because it seemed like there was definitely some interest (or at least some curious minds).

What I found most interesting was how I had to adapt my presentation to the audience.  Talking about pair programming, test-driven development and continuous integration is not as important to a group of BAs as it would be to a group of developers.  Instead, I focused more on the benefits of moving from BRUP to more JIT requirements, and trying to justify why it’s ok to define high-level requirements up-front, yet defer the details until the point where the development teams are actually going to implement them.

With any luck, there will be some ensuing discussion about the merits of agile and iterative practices; if nothing else, it will have been an opportunity to get some new ideas into a few more minds…