Role: Analyst
The person in this role represents customer and end-user concerns by gathering input from stakeholders to understand the problem to be solved and by capturing and setting priorities for requirements.
Role Sets: OpenUP Roles
Relationships
Staffing
Skills

An analyst needs the following knowledge, skills, and abilities:

  • Expertise in identifying and understanding problems and opportunities
  • Ability to articulate the needs that are associated with the key problem to be solved or opportunity to be realized
  • Ability to collaborate effectively with the extended team through collaborative working sessions, workshops, JAD sessions and other techniques.
  • Good communication skills, verbally and in writing
  • Knowledge of the business and technology domains or the ability to quickly absorb and understand such information

Assignment Approaches

This role can be assigned in the following ways:

  • On small, agile teams this role is often shared among several team members that also perform other roles.  See Guideline: Self Organize Work Assignments and Guideline: Staffing a Project for more information on this approach.
  • One (or more) team member(s) performs this role exclusively. This commonly adopted approach is suitable for complex requirements that are difficult to gather.
  • One staff (or more) team member(s) performs both this role and the Tester role. This is a good option for smaller or resource-constrained test teams.