Who should be on your team?

We are starting this new project with a customer and during the envisioning phase someone asked me a question about the Business Analyst being part of the Scrum team. The question was "here we have a BA who needs to work on something during the Sprint, so should she attend the daily stand up calls?" To me the answer is straight ... but let me get that answer to you by using an Agile practice I all as "Ask a Why" (or "Why 5").

So let us ask below questions to ourselves and see if we can get the answers. Is this BA going to work on something
- that is going to affect or contribute to the Sprint Deliverable?
- that may become a bottleneck if not completed?
- that may have some dependency that the Scrum team is going to deliver?
- that scrum team including the product owner will be interested to know the progress on daily basis

If the answer to any or many of above questions is affirmative, then yes the BA should be part of the daily stand up - which also means the BA should be part of the planning meeting, she should have a backlog (as part of your Sprint Backlog), should provide status and report bottlenecks and also attend the retrospective if possible (you never know, the same devil may show up again in some sprint :) ).

The scrum master was intelligent enough to get the answer based on the questions I threw at him and here we are ... working on the Sprint which is going on smooth. And once again "Ask a Why" worked.