The key part in that is communication. That’s makes all the difference whether it be with BA’s, QA’s, or the end user. Speeds up the development cycle and greatly reduces the number of bugs.

The best experience I had was on a team that had essentially 2 BA’s and 7 devs. There was constant communication to clarify actual requirements, devs would build automated tests off them, BA’s would test against the requirements and then a business user would do a final look over. All in all features were able to be released usually within a day and there would be days we’d get out 3 or 4 releases. Only in one case did a major bug get released to production and the root cause of that was poorly worded regulations which had a clarifying errata come out at the 11th hour.

For as many faults as that company had that caused me to move on I’ve yet to run across a team that functioned as well as that one did.