Business Analyst (BA)

Business Analyst (BA)

·         He is the person who plays the role of a bridge between the business team (customer) and the technical team (service provider).

·         A business analyst collects requirements from the client or SME (subject matter expert) and translates it into technical requirements for the software or product. The BA also documents and tracks these requirements to ensure completion.

·         E.g. Suppose your client is a call centre. The client wants to run a new promotion. Whenever someone calls, they hear about the offer before being redirected to a call agent. The business requirement in this case is "play promotional offer before caller is transferred to agent." The technical requirements may be a bit more complex. They may include: Get voice segment, store voice segment in database, play voice segment when specific call flow is triggered, track effectiveness of voice segment, etc.

·         A Business Analyst is the liaison between the business people and the technical people in a company. The business people viz. the stakeholders of the project, are the ones whose business needs are catered to by a software company. The technical team is trained to cater to a business need. It is the role of the Business Analyst to capture the business needs and understand the pain areas of a company to explain it to the technical team.

·         The analyst is involved in the design or modification of business systems or IT systems. The analyst interacts with the business stakeholders and technical team in order to understand their problems and needs. The analyst gathers, documents and analyzes business needs and requirements.

Job Duties:

·         Requirement Gathering : To identify the organization’s business needs

·         To define the organization’s policies and market approaches

·         Documenting and translating customer business functions and processes.

·         To standardize the organization’s workflows

·         The interpretation of business rules and requirements for technical system.

·         Business requirement (Business Plan / Project Plan)

Skills:

·         Communication Skills

·         Documentation And Writing Skills

·         Presentation Skills

·         Modelling Skills

·         Time Management

·         Stakeholder Management

·         Agile Epic/Story creation and writing experience

Tools:

·         Microsoft Office Suite

·         Google Docs

·         Rational Requisite Pro

·         Balsamiq

·         SWOT

·         Pencil

·         Trello

·         SmartDraw

Business Analyst Requirements Gathering Tools:

·         For Data Extraction – SQL, Talend Open Studio, etc.

·         Prototyping – Pencil, Balsamiq, etc.

·         Analytics – KISSmetrics, Google, etc.

·         Modelling – Ms-Visio, Visual Paradigm, Enterprise Architect, etc…

Certifications:

CBAP (Certified Business Analyst Professional)

Other Terms:

Requirements Gathering is the process of generating a list of requirements (functional, system, technical, etc.) from the various stakeholders (customers, users, vendors, IT staff, etc.) that will be used as the basis for the formal Requirements Definition.

Sketch, Wireframe, Mockup, Prototype:

1. Sketch

It’s basically just a raw freehand drawing on a piece of paper, that gives you a low-fidelity representation of your app. It is the fastest way to get your idea ready for brainstorming. Even a simple sketch can describe your idea better than words. Generate ideas, change details, visualize what you have on your mind; it’s all up to your imagination. This step is essential for getting to the wireframe stage.

Tools: Pen and templates on paper.

2. Wireframe

A wireframe is equivalent to the skeleton or simple structure of your website/app. Each one is used to describe the functionality of a product as well as relations between views (what will happen when you click a certain button). The decisions on what (content/features) and where to put on the website or app are usually made during this stage. This step does not cover the product’s design.

A website wireframe, also known as a page schematic or screen blueprint, is a visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a website. Wireframes are created for the purpose of arranging elements to best  accomplish a particular purpose. A wireframe model is a blueprint of the structure and functions of a user interface, usually a website. ... The Business Analyst builds the wireframe early in the requirements and development process. It usually happens before an actual solution is available to present to the customer.

Tools: Balsamiq

3. Mockup:

A mockup is a visual way of representing a product. While a wireframe mostly represents a product's structure, a mockup shows how the product is going to look like. But still, a mockup is not clickable (just like the wireframe). As opposed to a wireframe, a mockup is either a mid or high-fidelity display of design.

Tools: Sketch

4. Prototyping

A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process.

A prototype is a draft version of a product that allows you to explore your ideas and show the intention behind a feature or the overall design concept to users before investing time and money into development.

Tools: UXPin

Business Analysts (BAs) VS Business Systems Analyst (BSAs):

The main difference between a business analyst and a systems analyst is that the BA is business specific and focuses on the broader context in the business of business changes and systems development for a business. On the other hand, the systems analyst will focus on system specific requirements.

Stakeholder:

A stakeholder is any person, organization, social group, or society at large that has a stake in the business. Thus, stakeholders can be internal or external to the business.

Story - Is essentially a requirement that is in a low enough detail that it can be estimated.

Task - Developers, testers may break the story down further into tasks to allow them to estimate, develop and test it.

Sprint is a short, time-boxed period when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work. Sprints are at the very heart of scrum and agile methodologies

Epic - Is simply a story, but is considered so large that it needs to be broken down into multiple stories.

Stories, bugs, and tasks are used to describe one single piece of work, while epics are used to describe a group of issues that all relate to the same, larger body of work. Epics are typically completed over several sprints, or a longer time frame if you don't use sprints.

An Epic can be defined as a big chunk of work that has one common objective. It could be a feature, customer request or business requirement, Epic is An epic captures a large body of work. It is essentially a large user story that can be broken down into a number of smaller stories. It may take several sprints to complete an epic. There is no true difference between a Story or a Task in JIRA Agile.

An agile epic is a body of work that can be broken down into specific tasks (called “stories,” or “user stories”) based on the needs/requests of customers or end users. Epics are a helpful way to organize your work and to create a hierarchy.

Story points enable the team to estimate stories in comparison to other stories, instead of forcing them to determine the time it will take to complete each story. Velocity is then worked out based on how many points the team can complete in each sprint.

Confluence is where you create, organize and discuss work with your team JIRA and Confluence are two separate products from Atlassian. Put simply, JIRA is an open, fully customizable platform for organizing teams around tasks/projects/initiatives. Task dependencies, resource accesses, permissions, hierarchies, etc can all be set up.

JIRA is a tool developed by Atlassian which is an Australian Company. The main purpose of Jira is to track bug, track related issue, and it is used for project management. The basic use of this tool is to track issue and bugs related to your software and Mobile apps.

A confluence is a collaboration tool. It is used to help teams to collaborate and share knowledge efficiently. Using Confluence, users can create blogs and pages which can be commented on and edited by all the members of a team.

JIRA vs Confluence is two separate products from the same company – Atlassian. ... JIRA is a fully customizable platform for organizing teams around tasks, projects, and initiatives.

Collaboration means working with another individual or group in order to achieve something. Collaboration in the workplace is when two or more people (often groups) work together through idea sharing and thinking to accomplish a common goal.

Atlassian:

Atlassian Corporation Plc is an Australian multinational enterprise software company that develops products for software developers, project managers, and content management. It is best known for its issue tracking application, Jira, and its team collaboration and wiki product, Confluence.

Atlassian tools:

·         Jira

·         Confluence

·         Hipchat / Stride

·         Bitbucket / Bitbucket Server

·         Bamboo

·         Fisheye

·         Crucible

·         Trello

SharePoint vs. Confluence is that SharePoint offers advanced customization options. SharePoint also comes with a robust data warehouse, so document storage is pretty hefty. Finally, SharePoint has tons more add-ons than Confluence

Microsoft: Teams, Share point

Atlassian: Confluence

Project management methodologies

·         Waterfall

·         Agile

·         Hybrid

·         Scrum

to support and interact with technical developers on the team

Story Pointing, Backlog Grooming, Epic Canvas and Burndown

Experience with Confluence and Jira tools in support of Agile processes and Agile Epic and Story creation.

(“Business Systems Analyst” OR “Technical Business analyst” OR “Technical BA” OR “Business analyst”) AND (“Remote team” OR Remote) AND (“Agile Development environment” OR Agile OR Scrum OR XP Kanban OR Waterfall OR “eXtreme Programming” OR FDD OR DSDM OR ASD OR Crystal  OR “Lean Software Development”  OR LSD”) AND (Developer OR “QA Engineer”) AND (API OR REST OR SOAP OR "Micro Services" Or Microservices) JSON AND (“cloud computing” OR cloud*)

Boolean Search Strings:

(“Business Analyst” OR “Business System Analyst” OR “Business systems analyst” OR BA OR BSA)

(“Business Analyst” OR “Business System Analyst” OR “Business systems analyst” OR BA OR BSA) OR  (“Project coordinator” OR “project analyst” OR “Project manager”)

·         Requirements gathering

·         User Stories writing

·         Agile Epic/Story creation and writing experience

·         Business process modeling, create Process Flowcharts

·         process mapping

·         Project Management methodologies

·         Interaction with technical developers on the team

·         Stakeholder Management

Trello, Confluence and Jira tools in support of Agile processes and

Sketch, Wireframe, Mockup, Prototype

CBAP (Certified Business Analyst Professional)