The Rise of the BAQA ("BaaKwaa")

The role of the Business Analyst (BA) and Quality Assurance Engineer (QA) as we know it is changing. As agile methodologies become prevalent, they appear to have an overlap. I think of a person performing this new role as a BAQA (pronounced BaaKwaa). The need for people in agile teams to wear different hats is spurring this development. In recent times, this has received a boost with the development of frameworks supporting Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD).

Agile teams, and in particular teams following BDD/ATDD, write user stories in place of verbose software requirements. The user story captures the essence of the requirement expressed in a "Role/Feature/Benefit" grammar. Subsequently, acceptance criteria are written as "Givens/Events/Outcomes" to exemplify the requirement. Together, they completely define the business requirement.While the user story requires a Business Analyst's skill, the acceptance criteria requires a Quality Assurance Engineer's skill. Essentially, we now have a need for a person who can play both roles.

Enter the BaaKwaa.

Let us see the typical responsibilities of a Business Analyst and QA Engineer in a traditional methodology, such as waterfall.

A Business Analyst:

• Understands the business domain
• Analyzes weaknesses and strengths and helps define new features
• Writes software requirements specifications for the development team

A Quality Analyst:

• Writes test cases
• Performs tests on software programs and finds defects
• Ensures the quality of the software

Here's a brief role description for a BaaKwaa in an agile team:

• Write the user story (thus capturing business requirements)
• Write the acceptance criteria (thus further expressing the requirements through examples)
• Write the acceptance criteria in a BDD/ATDD framework in the language of the framework (example: Fitnesses, Cucumber, StoryQ, etc)
• Verify that the implementation meets the acceptance criteria preferably through automated means.

I'm not suggesting that we are witnessing the demise of the specialist BA and QA. There is a role for the specialist and there always will be, just as we continue to have architects, DBA's and user interface specialists in agile teams. However, they will be required to drop their BA or QA hat quite often, and instead wear the BAQA hat.

Please welcome the BaaKwaa.