What you should know to become a Business Analyst ?(part 01)
This is a collection of common interview questions that most of the interviewees might ask during a BA interview. If your target is to open up your career path as a Business Analyst this series might help you.
01) Who is a business Analyst?
Business Analyst is like a bridge which connects two points. Consider the 2 points as a client and a developer. The technical terms used by a developer may not help a client to understand the project. Sometimes the developer wont understand what the client requires. But a BA can fill this gap as he/she has an understanding about both client side and the developer’s side.
A BA helps the project team in project planning, designing and finally validating the developed components.
02) What is a requirement?
A target solution to achieve a specific business goal or an objective.Every requirement should be properly identified, collected , understood and documented for further references.
The BABOK defines a requirement as:
(1) A condition or capability needed by a stakeholder to solve a problem or achieve an objective
(2) A condition or capability that must be met or possessed by a solution or solution component to satisfy a contract, standard, specification, or other formally imposed documents
(3) A documented representation of a condition or capability as in (1) or (2).
03) What are the facts that should be discovered during Elicitation phase?
- What all know, and can tell us.
- What they know, but didn’t think of saying.
- What they don’t know, but we need to find out.
- What nobody knows, and yet its highly relevant and required.
04) Name few requirement elicitation techniques.
- interviews — Get the most detailed knowledge from the best sources
- workshops — Provide group economies of scale and leverage interaction
- observations — Observing natural behavior in the wild
- scenarios — Theoretical discussions about what actually happens
- prototyping — Hypothetical discussions about what could happen
- data analysis — Scouring the documents and data sources for knowledge
05) Name some of the documents that a business analyst use to handle?
· Project vision document
· Use cases
· Requirement Management Plan
· User stories
· Requirement Traceability Matrix (RTM)
· Business Requirement Document
· System Requirement Specification (SRS)/ System Requirement Document (SRD)
· Functional Requirement Specification (FRS)/ Functional Specification Document (FSD)
06) What is gap analysis?
Gap Analysis is a technique which is used to analyse the gap between the current(existing) system and the system that you are about to build(targeted system).Here the term Gap, defines the magnitude of change that is required to get the intended result.
07) Which documents are used to capture non — functional requirements?
- SDD (System Design Document)
- FRD (Functional Requirement Document)
(These two documents are also important during the process of modeling the Use case diagram)
08) What is agile manifesto?
Agile Manifesto is a guide for software developers about Agile development principles to ensure iterative solutions.
09) What do you mean by scope creep?
When a project stretches far beyond its original vision, it is called “scope creep”. This factor may cause project failure. The problem comes with any unauthorized changes which can affect productivity, deliverable not being achieved, budgets being exceeded.
10) What causes scope creep?
- Lack of a project scope statement.
- Poor communication between team members, team leaders/project managers, clients, and stakeholders.
- Time frames and deadlines that are impossible to achieve.
- Attempting to add additional uncontrolled changes that haven’t been approved.
- Not following proper change management.
