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90 DUBINSKY, HAZZAN, TALBY, AND KEREN
still, these tasks that involve communication with the developers consume only about 20 percent
of their time. In contrast, on the agile team (the examined project), the five systems analysts
allocated 10, 20, 25, 40, and 50 percent of the systems analysis tasks to communication with
development.

CONCLUSION

This chapter presents the implications of transition to agile software development on systems
analysis and design. We compare the design and testing products of two software teams in a
large-scale software project—one of which used a plan-driven approach and the other, an agile
approach. Both projects used the same methodology and tools for systems analysis.
Examining specifications and tests over eight months, we found that the agile process produces
specifications that are more modular and simpler than the plan-driven one. We also found that when
testing activities are strongly embedded in the process, more tests are provided and this behavior
can hold for months. Accordingly, we suggest emphasizing the testing practice by creating whole
teams with QA testers as part of the teams, and writing acceptance test suites that are correlated
with the specifications to strengthen the systems analysis and design.
We further examined the role of systems analysts in the agile environment and found that for
large-scale projects the suggested hybrid development model fits better, meaning that the project
analysts’ group is in charge of preliminary analysis and then the agile team together with the
customer and the team’s systems analysts produce the detailed specifications.

NOTE

1. For simplicity, we merged the “tend to disagree” and “disagree” answers with “disagree,” and “tend
to agree” and “agree” answers with “agree.”
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