Anyway, we decided prototypical use cases took too long, nobody reads 'em and we have to move fast.

User stories? Don't have a customer team member empowered to make decisions, much less write 'em. I'll write 'em with my best guesses and incorporate them in overlying functional specifications.

Well, said our SCRUM Coach, let's take a design meeting.

Monday: sketch, discuss, argue for an hour or two to model and generate agreement on each 'major' feature.

Monday through Wednesday:

• BA (Business Analyst) guy heads off to create a functional specification and post to the wiki- leaving pointers for wireframes.
• IA (Information Architect) goes off to create a wireframe.
• BA and IA discuss informally when IA doesn't read what BA wrote or BA doesn't properly integrate wireframe intention.
• Developers code base functionality.

By Friday, the functional spec cum wireframe is  on the wiki for the team to read, comment upon and prepare for final revision run through on the second Monday of the sprint.

Guess what?

Nobody read it until they started coding.

So Mondays now include a Review session, when the developer(s) assigned meet with the BA, IA and Architect to make sure we have everything covered- usually takes a half or or so before or after a design session.

Developers roll into the code with a vengeance and have a prototype ready to demonstrate to the customer on Tuesday or Thursday. BA takes notes, adds to the specification or to the backlog (as appropriate). This turns out to be our major interaction with an end user.

Typically, two demos are done for each simple feature- a 'rough draft' and, with user notes, a 'final draft' and we move on to the next feature.

The Team gets anywhere from three to eight major features rolled into each four week sprint with this routine.

We're about ready for the first code freeze for deployment of the beta, have 95% of the base functionality ready for a fairly complex web application and we're pushing down the bug list daily.

Not bad for a first shot at Agile for this BA. Of course a team of three exceptional Developers, a highly experienced architect and a wonderful IA made this team work well... with very few late nights or 'crunch' sprints.

I'm getting to like this while thing.

Next up: Are BAs necessary for the typical Agile Team? (Guess what the answer is)