The role that Business Analysts are playing in firms is indispensable. It’s because of these professionals that projects can start and end on time before losing time or capital. Business Analysts are the communicators between the developer’s team and management people. They gel in as the interface between these two teams to function smoothly and effectively. Effective communication from Business Analysts is what it takes to deliver software on time, save resources for the customer, thereby saving money and cutting short expenses due to delay.
But the practice of keeping Business Analysts has just begun just lately. Earlier, not many businesses had a Business Analyst to look after the Software Development process. And because of that not many companies or firms or even clients know the exact role of a Business Analyst sometimes. Take up the Intellipaat Business Analyst training course to help you master the domain and tools from scratch. This guide is for them to help make them understand how crucial is the role of a Business Analyst.
This guide will help you understand the responsibilities of a Business Analyst and let you know the various benefits that they bring to the table for various businesses.
The challenge of the Software Development Process
Each Software Development process is a project in itself. And each of these starts with an idea. Now not every member needs to understand the idea. They may think that only developers are required on the team as only they have what it takes to get the project completed. But they cannot be far from the truth. It’s Business Analysts who do all the coordination work that gets the project completed on time. Starting from stakeholders’ requirements till the daily updates and planning on features on a product or service. Business Analysts make sure the developers and the management panels are on the same page.
Developers alone couldn’t decide which features must be added and which are the ones to omit. All the services of products that are coming out through the project must adhere to industry standards, which many times developers will not be aware of. Business Analysts are good at converting a raw idea or requirements into an actionable solution that developers can now work upon. And only Business Analysts with a good amount of domain knowledge will be able to do that.
Let’s now focus a bit on the skill sets of a Business Analyst.
A qualified Business Analyst will require four major skills to prove his worth to successfully look after his responsibilities, and they are:
Domain knowledge or Technical skills:
Strong technical knowledge or domain knowledge is required for effectively communicating with developers. They must be able to understand the team’s weaknesses and strengths along with understanding the technical terms and specifics within the project’s limitations. It is required to have knowledge on Business Analysis tools such as Visio, Tableau, Clickup, Nifty etc.
Analytical and Problem-Solving skills:
Analytical skills do help us not only in this domain but in every field. This skill helps us properly analyze a situation and transform the unknowns into requirements. The Problem Solving skill will help you arrive at a decision quickly after analyzing all the points derived from the respective stakeholders.
Business Analyst’s responsibilities in a Software Development project
The major responsibilities of a Business Analyst within a Software Development Project are:
- To clearly define the scope of the project.
- To conduct business research.
- To gather project requirements.
- Create requirement specifications
- Translate requirements to the developer’s team.
- And perform acceptance testing.
Let’s discuss each of them in brief:
Clearly define the scope of the project.
Business Analysts must work on defining the scope of the project or how it should look in the initial stages itself. It will help in speeding up the development time by cutting down on unnecessary time spent on developing secondary or nice features which could be added later. It makes the whole process clear by assessing required resources and other potential risks, producing estimates, and handling project backlogs.
Conduct business research
Before setting up laden plans for the project BAs must be thorough with their business research and that means they have to research about their competitors, analyze documents, brainstorm, create prototypes, and use many other methods to gain as much insight before committing to the devised plan.
Gather Project requirements
BAs must be proficient in gathering requirements for the projects. Only they have the set of skills needed to gather effective requirements from the concerned stakeholders. It is their job to ask correct questions from the clients and other stakeholders and analyze them before consolidating them into requirements that developers use to build the service. BA acts as a bridge between developers and clients.
Create Requirement specifications
Now once they understand the root cause of the problem by asking correct questions, they will collate all these suggestions, and requirements into one single specification sheet that will contain the entire requirements as skill sets required, the technology needed, etc., to complete the project.
Translate these requirements to the team
BAs then will have to sit with the developer’s team and translate all these requirements clearly and effectively that developers can understand. This stage is significant because if they don’t understand, then the whole project could be disastrous.
Perform Acceptance Testing
Once developers work on the product or service, BAs must conduct Acceptance testing, which is needed to verify that requirements are fulfilled and the product is ready to be released.
