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INTERVIEW QUESTION:

What is the role of the business systems analyst in testing?

Posted by manan

// 12923 Views // 6 Additional Answers & Comments

Categories: Business Analysis, Systems Analysis, Solution Assessment and Validation (BABOK KA)

ANSWER

The business systems analyst is often responsible for ensuring that the business requirements are satisfied by the final system implementation. This is called requirements validation.

Depending on the organization, a business analyst can be involved in a variety of testing activities:

One requirements validation technique used by business analysts and systems analysts is the creation of test cases to ensure the final implementation supports the system requirements. Creation of test cases prior to design and implementation often discover problems long before they occur in system development. Test cases could be created by the business analyst or the business analyst could be a reviewer or approver of the test cases created by the testing team.

Business Analysts who are part of a SCRUM team may either help the testers on the team or may actually be responsible for unit testing the code created by the team in cases when there are no dedicated testers.

It is also not uncommon, for business analysts to assist with end-to-end integrated testing performed by the technology team or assisting with User Acceptance Testing (UAT) performed by the business team or business users.

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ADDITIONAL ANSWERS / COMMENTS

Adrian M. posted on Wednesday, March 12, 2008 1:47 PM

Many business analysts also participate in UAT (User Acceptance Testing) along with the actual stakeholders.

Tim Bryce posted on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 11:03 AM

I would take it further and say that the Analyst is also responsible for producing the test plans for the various sub-systems and the system overall. This should all be performed prior to the design being turned over to programming. The software people will have to test the programs, but it is the responsibility of the Analyst to test the system and sub-systems.

VN posted on Wednesday, April 16, 2008 8:54 AM

Actually the testing and test scripts wriring is not considered a BA activity at all according to the BABOK. Such activities should not be included in the CBAP application either.
Outside the books, the BAs sometimes even participate in the QA of the solution.

sam posted on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 3:29 PM

BA involvement in testing is more toward advising on the formulation of the Test Plan and Test Case of the System(s) to be tested. By the time the need for testing phases kicks in, BA would already have the better understanding of different interfaces and system interaction and functions for a particular requirement to be implemented. Hence,BA would be a great source in formulation of solid test Plan. Also, Test Case are developed from Use cases that BA creates, this in turn would give upper hand to BA roles to make sure the test cases are effective enough to check the requirements. Furthermore, BA roles in UAT is highly visible as BA will be the main liaison among Users and the IT team.

Rajneesh Upreti posted on Saturday, September 27, 2008 8:56 AM

I think testing is an integeral part of BAs job. Thus he should not only be doing test plan formulation, developing the test matrix, doing scenario planning and working out steps of recreation in case of system issues, he should also be doing the functional testing of typical functional changes in the system in a maintenance project.

Sandeep posted on Wednesday, July 27, 2011 6:01 AM

it is business analyst job to ensure that each and every user requirement has been captured , developed and tested .
Testing ; validation process; BA should involve in creation and reviewing of test plan test case and test results to declare that right things has been developed in right way.

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