Great questions. I have submitted them via our Ask a BA feature to see if we can’t find someone with more agile BA experience to give you a good answer.

The short answer to #1, from my experience, is that there will be technical user stories, but that they have to have business value. So, the user might be a technical user and not an “end user” as a BA would typically think about it.

For example, if you were automating a particular query or report, you might write something such as:

As a developer, I can automate XYZ report so that I don’t have to spend 15 minutes every morning creating and distributing the report.

This clearly has business value in terms of time savings. I suppose the most important thing is that the person making the final decisions as to priorities has the information they need about the technical stories to prioritize them appropriately. And the second important thing might be that the development team is not forcing more of a waterfall approach by creating a bunch of technical stories that would best be handled in slices. The first the BA can help with. The second might best be left to the PM and technical lead and whoever the main agile evangelist is within your organization.

1) One of the challenges in this case is to keep the stories clear from the user perspective (“As a user .. . I can… so that…”) and NOT to have technically formulated user stories, the way many developers tend to do.
So what are the ‘minimum requirements’ for a user story to be added on the Product Backlog?

2) Another challenge I’m currently facing is coordinating multiple Product Backlogs for a one big project. The stakeholder preferred the ‘component’ teams approach; each ‘component’ team with its own Product Backlog.

E.g.:
Team A develops a front-end product. Team A has Product Backlog A
Team B develops the platform for Team A. Team B has Product Backlog B.
In the end it is one product released.

How would you start creating the Product Backlogs and keep them synchronized? Who owns the Product Backlog for Team B?
Maybe this is an idea for a future article on ‘Bridging the Gap’ 🙂

Thanks for all the great pieces of information I could find by reading this website!
Madalina

Complete control of the backlog comes with a set of responsibilities that are a bit beyond, in my opinion, those of a “BA”. As a BA you should be working with a stakeholder for business priorities and with a PM or development team for implementation priorities.

If the BA has complete control, they are set. If not, then they are probably not real product owner. Ask these questions:
– Do they develop the backlog?
– Do they prioritize the backlog?

– Jake Calabrese
http://www.vimstreet.com/blog