Technical Topics

I spent a lot of time in the past half-century doing software work: requirements, design, user experience, programming, testing, project management, writing documentation, process improvement leadership, writing 7 books and many articles, consulting, and training. Sure, there were some side trips along the way,.... But basically I’m a software guy. Over all that time, I’ve accumulated numerous insights about the software business. Here I offer 66 of those lessons. Perhaps you’ll find them as helpful as I have.

After some research, I was taken back with so many machine learning applications already in use: weather forecasting, medical diagnoses, law enforcement, and self-driving vehicles. Also, I did not realized that it was the advancements of big data and faster computing that allowed the break-thru of AI in our daily lives. Most of us, I believe, think that artificial intelligence is still science fiction. Not so! We as business analysts need to pursue AI education and recognize the many business opportunities opening up to all of us.

Capability-based planning is a growing practice in the field of enterprise architecture. Its success is due to the fact that it provides actual value to practitioners and the organizations that employs them. Indeed, capability-based planning helps in a number of ways, from providing a clear understanding of existing capabilities to promoting effective Business-IT alignment. Considering these benefits, we thought it useful to address this practice and bring some clarity to the subject for the benefit of all who might not yet have a good handle on the topic.

DevOps is based on a culture of trusted partners. This partnership is between software development, quality assurance, security and controls, and operations. The result is a smooth and fast transition of software from development to operations. However, like Dover, if the trusted partners are somehow reorganized into formal handoffs each with their own software acceptance procedures, the movement of software is no longer smooth nor fast.

The function of a technical business analyst is to bridge between business and technical teams. This can be undertaken in various forms. First, the bridging can be done by translating business requirements into technical artifacts. The analyst must be able to assess the business and note the basic requirements of that particular business at that given time. Using their skilled knowledge in technology they must be able to translate the given come up requirements into technological terms. The requirements must, therefore, be taken care of technologically for efficiency and accuracy.

If you have some experience in modeling real-life, full-size architectures for large-scale organizations – preferably in the ArchiMate language, of course – you have likely come across the challenge of organizing your models in logical and manageable ways. In the following pages, we’re going to share our top 6 ways to organize your architecture models. These methods should help you keep your models neat and tidy, while also supporting better outcomes for your strategic initiatives. Let’s see what they are.

Strategists, architects, process experts, software developers, data managers and other professionals involved in changing the enterprise often put substantial effort in creating all kinds of useful models of their designs. In many cases, such business models, enterprise architecture models, business process models, software models, or data models are only used to specify some design, i.e. to describe what should be built. 
But there is much more value to be had from these models, by using powerful analysis techniques to elicit new insights. In the following pages I will cover 7 of these analyses, discussing the business outcomes you can achieve with their help.

The purpose of this article is to explore feature files. Feature files are documents that contain those Gherkin scenarios & requirements – they can be very useful to teams working on BDD projects. Feature files may be a key deliverable for BAs.  Feature files are where BAs store requirements & can create the bridge between requirements and automated tests (more on that later).

 In this article we look at some quality attributes that are particularly vital to explore when specifying requirements for embedded systems projects. Quality attributes for embedded systems can be much more complex and intertwined than those for other applications. Business software is generally used in an office where there’s not much variance in the environment. In contrast, the operating environment for embedded systems could involve temperature extremes, vibration, shock, and other factors that dictate specific quality considerations.

A business analyst is a person who analyzes, organizes, explores, scrutinizes and investigates an organization and documents its business and also assesses the business model and integrates the whole organization with modern technology. The Business Analyst role is mostly about documenting, verifying, recording and gathering the business requirements and its role is mostly associated with the information technology industry.

This article explores strategy mapping as discussed within Business Architecture Guild BIZBOK, and attempts to extend the discussion by defining a set of information and graphical principles that allows strategy to be represented graphically.

The UML Component Diagram along with the complementary UML Deployment Diagram shows how a software solution will be delivered and deployed in the form of interconnected components that interoperate via well-defined interfaces. You can think of this as analogous to how electronic components are wired together, and in this context you should consider that any one component may be replaced by a different but compatible component with no adverse effect.

Data migration is typically the most forgotten or underestimated component of an IT project which is the process of making a copy of data and moving it from one system to another, preferably without disrupting or disabling active business processes. On some occasions, it is not easy to understand that a data migration is needed in the project and ...

With 24-hours a day, unceasing news being forced in our ears and down our throats, with computers that blog, phones that text and everything that twitters, we have information rushing back and forth at us at speeds that can only be measured in nanoseconds. It is information on steroids and it can and often does get us in trouble[1]. Analyzing, corroborating, vetting and authenticating this rush of information, misinformation and hyperinformation are at times almost impossible.

Problems arise though when the critical front-end work is performed by programmers who are more in tune with technology than business. From their perspective, they see everything in terms of zeroes and ones, not in dollars and cents. Not surprising, they only think in terms of elegant technical solutions, not necessarily what is practical from a business perspective.