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TRANSITION TO AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IN A LARGE-SCALE PROJECT 89
Figure 6.11 The Position of the System Analyst According to the Examined-Project
System Analysts
a b

fifteen interviewees from the Israeli software industry. We note that this is field material that is
used for the analysis. The text was translated to English for the purpose of presentation.
As can be observed, some of the systems analysts conceive of their position as part of project
management (Figure 6.10b) or even as the heart of the entire organization (Figure 6.10c). Most of
them, however, draw pictures similar to Figure 6.10a, which means that they receive input from
the customer and deliver their product to the developers, who, in turn, work with the testers. We
referred to this model earlier as the pipeline-distributed model.
In contrast, and as has been illustrated in our previous work (Dubinsky et al., 2006), the draw-
ings of the systems analysts of the examined project reflect that their role is mainly conceived as
a bridge between the customer and the developers. In an additional interview, three months later,
the systems analysts of the examined project still perceived their position as a bridge, which is
part of both sides—the customer side as well as the implementation side, which is composed of
functional analysts, developers, and testers (see Figure 6.11a).
Figure 6.11b reflects that the strict lines of hierarchy (presented in Figure 6.10) are replaced
with circles, which reflect joint work. The dashed line in the top left corner is directed to the proj-
ect manager and indicates a common goal for all people involved, who, as the figure shows, are
systems analysts, developers, team leaders, testers, the customer, and the component managers.
The placement of the customer ellipse in the middle of the picture is not a coincidence; rather, it
emphasizes the intensive collaboration between the customer and the other parties involved.
The second and third questions in the SAQ refer to the main skills and difficulties of the systems
analysts. Most of the systems analysts from both research samples indicated the following main
skills: global perspective, creativity, capability of high-level of abstraction, and openness. Most of
the systems analysts from both populations indicated the following main difficulties: understanding
the customer, technical and performance limitations of the development group, tight schedules,
and continuous changes in requirements.
The forth SAQ question, again, reveals a difference between the general systems analysts and
those of the agile team. In the industry sample, ten out of fifteen systems analysts mentioned
only systems analysis tasks like requirements analysis and design. Only five systems analysts
mentioned tasks such as knowledge transfer and communication with the development team;