I am wondering what type of software tools do you use (or used) in your day to day role as analyst (anything from Notepad to Rational Rose)?

Here are some that I use:

• SOFTWARE: MS World, PURPOSE: Functional Specifications, Requirements Documents, Vision Document, Business Case.
• SOFTWARE: MS Excel, PURPOSE: Capacity planning, Traceability, Data Analysis.
• SOFTWARE: MS Visio, PURPOSE: Process Models, Use Case Models, Domain Models (Class Diagram), Sequence Diagrams.
• SOFTWARE: ErWin, PURPOSE: Entity Relationship Diagrams.
• SOFTWARE: MS PowerPoint, PURPOSE: Present of problem statements, Present possible solutions, etc.
• SOFTWARE: Visual Studio Web Edition, PURPOSE: UI Mockups, Prototypes

- Adrian

As consultants, we stick with Office and Visio, as above. Our standard approach does not involve prototyping, but will use clients' tools as needed.

Adrian:

One must not forget about the Scotch tape!    Got to have Scotch tape (the type you can write on) - especially for larger scale analysis efforts.

When I am in the discovery phase on a larger scale analysis project, I follow the flow of data from as high of a level of abstraction as possible.   Since I am in discovery, typically, I do not know how the data is going to ultimately flow: left, right, up, down, in, out, - all over the place - changing direction at a moments notice, a ton of cross overs.  Plus I constantly need to squeeze in things that I forgot.   The first couple of iternations look like a big mess, but, are just clear enough that I can read them.  When I run out of room while diagramming,  which happens frequently, I quickly  scotch tape another piece of paper on and keep going.   The thing is to keep going.  Trying to create a Visio of a big mess, while still in a heavy requirements discovery phase, is a real initiative killer.

Now when it comes to walkthroughs of  sub-systems, then Visio (or whatever) can really help.  And, after the first couple of iterations, when things are realively firmed up, I create a set of parent-child Visio diagrams of the whole systems.  Word processing after modeling is fine.  

FYI:  Visio and the like also hinder a larger scale analysis effort by making me frequently switch mental gears from thinking about flow from a high level of abstraction to thinking about detail-oriented software commands.  The mental-gear switching can be very exhausting!

Tony

Other tools we use around our organization:

• Skype - our entire team standardized on this for chats and remote whiteboarding. This is really helpful with teams spread out around the world. Sometimes we get the whole team in one chat from many locations, to either amuse each other or ask real questions.
• OneNote - there are a few co-workers that love it, though I personally haven't taken to it yet! I don't mind it, but I'm still stuck on Word it seems.
• Google Desktop - great searching through emails and notes.
• FreeMind - or any free mind mapping software. I installed this one first and have been happy with it, though I don't use it frequently.

IT'S NOT A BA TOOL - but ProcessPad - its simple, easy, great, cheap, and takes 4 min to learn - its actually for business users and not BA's - its basically designed to let a business user do all the mapping, stats and documentation (wrod, pdf, html, csv) that can then be exported streight into a BA tool

It does use BPMN - BUT IT'S NOT A BA TOOL

SO IT'S NOT A BA TOOL - but there is a 4 min video on www.processmaster.com

I was using Visio to do the UML diagrams but now I use UModel to do both UML and BPMN modeling.  I'm pretty new to the UML/BPMN world but UModel seems like it's going to work.  I am experiencing quite a hassle getting things formatted properly (especially BPMN diagrams), but that should get better.

I still use Visio for DFDs.

• Outlook - Meetings, Emails, tasks
• OneNote, paper - Requirements Gathering, tasks integrated into Outlook
• Mindjet Mindmanager - Organising my work and mind on one page. Also to produce various MS Word docs and MS project charts, tasks integrated into Outlook
• MS Word - finishing up docs created by MM, above
• MS Project - finishing up docs created by MM, above
• BizAgi Process Modeler - Process Modelling

Peter