Entries for November 2007

Sometimes the business analyst can be so caught up in a project he or she forgets tried and true methods do not always work. The analysis team is trying to get done what the customer has scoped out and sets up a plan of action. The plan of action requires certain fundamentals. There are times when these rudimentary ideas just do not work for the client. The client can not understand why these steps may be so important. This is when the business analyst needs to step back and ask the same questions as the client. It is all in communication.

Author: Tony de Bree

It does not matter what project you are going to undertake. It is not important what industry you are going to be assessing. What is important is you know what you are going to do. You must as questions. You must find what it is the client wants. Presented is a list of obvious questions every good business analyst should know the answer to when starting a project.

Author: Tony de Bree

The work of a business analyst is to develop an understanding of business process and model them. Usually the work is associated with a project whose objectives are to change or improve a process. Often these processes are quite complex and the analyst must get the information from many sources. Usually much of the information and ideas for improve...

Agile Modeling (AM) defines a collection of core and supplementary principles that when applied on a software development project set the stage for a collection of modeling practices. Some of the principles have been adopted from eXtreme Programming (XP) and are well documented in Extreme Programming Explained, which in turn adopted them from commo...

One of the unfortunate aspects of industry-level paradigm shifts, such as what we're seeing with the move to agile software development, is that the followers of the incumbent paradigm often get to set the tone of the conversation. A perfect example of this is that traditionalists will often claim that agile approaches are riskier than traditional ...

Several software projects are over budgeted or have to face failures during operations. One big reason of this is Software Company develops wrong software due to wrong interpretation of requirements. Requirements engineering is one of the well known discipline within Software engineering which deals with this problem. RE is the process of eliciti...

Business Analysis is a straightforward process of analysing business change requirements. Why, then, are there so many methods, approaches, techniques and tools for doing what is – essentially – the same job? In order to understand this, we need to rewind a bit in time to look at where Business Analysis came from, where it currently is ...

Extreme programming (XP) introduced the practice of expressing requirements in the form of user stories, short descriptions of functionality–told from the perspective of a user–that are valuable to either a user of the software or the customer of the software. The following are typical user stories for a job posting and search site: ...

As long as practitioners recognize that use case diagrams are optional and iconic (as opposed to schematic), they shouldn't have problems. The diagrams are useful, for example, on whiteboards as a way of sketching and framing an agenda while people are writing up and reviewing use case detail on index cards. The trouble starts, however, when pr...

I was recently helping a friend staff a fairly large project with a team of very experienced, very skilled people. I mentioned that people were really excited about the opportunity. He asked me “Why are they excited? What is it about this project that makes people want to work on it?”

That led us to a discussion about teams of highly skilled people and what motivates them to want to work on a project.

Author: Geri Schneider Winters

* Article used with permission from Wyyzzk, Inc.’s Resources for Business Analysts site at http://www.writingusecases.com This website of reports and tips contains information to help you succeed as a Business Analyst in IT.