In Analysis
- Business Analyst: Our next user story involves creating an API (let’s call it “Customer API”).
- Developer A: How novel! That’s what I did yesterday and the day before and the day before that.
- Business Analyst: Great, should I let the clients know that it wouldn’t take as long to build it?
- Developer A: Hold on. We haven’t even heard the requirements for Customer API.
- Business Analyst: It’s just a couple of hundred fields that Customer API needs to send to another downstream API to perform the transaction.
- Developer A: And how will we know the values for these fields that Customer API needs to send?
- Business Analyst: I’ll take care of it. I have already spoken to the lead developer from the downstream API team, and he’s sent me a spreadsheet. It has all the fields and the values that need to be part of the request body. He’s also sent me a document with information on the headers and auth details required to call the downstream API.
- Developer A: Is this downstream API available in a testing environment? A playground, maybe?
- Business Analyst: They’re still working on building the downstream API, so they don’t have a working version yet.
In Development
Developer A gets to work. She pairs with Developer B, another application developer on her team, to finish the Customer API story. Business Analyst sends them an email with a spreadsheet containing the fields and a document that includes the API currently in development by the downstream API team. It seems like Developer A and Developer B have all the information required to start building the Customer API, so they come up with the following list of tasks: