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Last updated on 08th Jul 2020, Blog, Tutorials

What Is Business Analysis?

• Business Analysis is defined as a research discipline that helps you to find the business needs and identify solutions to business problems.
• These solutions may include the development of a software/system component, improvements in process, organizational changes or strategic planning and policy development.
• The purpose of business analysis is to identify solutions that meet the need for improvement.

Common Business Analysis Techniques key to guide stakeholders of a project who performs business modeling in an orderly manner.

Who is a Business Analyst?

• A business analyst is someone who analyzes an organization or business domain (real or hypothetical) and documents its business, processes, or systems, assessing the business model or its integration with technology.
• However, organizational titles vary such as analyst, business analyst, business systems analyst or maybe systems analyst.

Why Use Business Analysis?

Here are important reasons for using Business analysis methods:

• It helps you to understand the structure and the dynamics of the company
• It allows you to understand current problems in the target organization.
• It helps you to identify improvement potentials and recommending solutions to enable an organization to achieve goals.
• It helps you to identify and articulate the need for change.
• To maximize the value delivered by an organization to its stakeholders.

Steps involved in Business Analysis Process

Here are the steps for Business Analysis:

1. Enterprise analysis
2. Requirement planning and Management
3. Requirement Elicitation
4. Requirement analysis and Documentation
5. Requirement Communication
6. Solution Evolution and Validation.

Step 1) Enterprise Analysis

This area covers a collection of pre-project activities that leads to up to project selection guided by the Business Analyst.

The activities are as follows:

• It helps to maintain Business Architecture
• Allows you to prepare the Business Case
• Preparing for Decision Package

Step 2) Requirement Planning & Management

In this step, you need to define the tasks and resource which are associated with the planning and management of requirements. This helps you to ensure that the set of activities that are undertaken is appropriate according to the specific project. It is also important to capture changes correctly and consistently.

Step 3) Requirement Elicitation

The requirement elicitation phase consists of researching and discovering the requirements of a system from users, customers, and other stakeholders.

Step 4) Requirements Analysis & Documentation

This stage describes how stakeholder needs to analyse, structure, and specify the design and implementation of a solution. Requirements analysis helps you define the methods and tools used to structure the raw data.

Step 5) Requirements Communication

This phase is the collection of activities for expressing the output of the requirement analysis. Moreover, every requirement needs to be packaged, evaluated, and approved before the solution is implemented.

Step 6) Solution Evaluation and Validation

This phase ensures that a solution should able to meets the stakeholder objectives.

Common Business Analysis Techniques

Here are the most important business analysis techniques:

MOST

• Most is a short form of Mission, Objectives, Strategies.
• It allows business analysts to perform thorough internal analysis of what is the aim of an organization to achieve and how to tackles such issues.

PESTLE

• Pestle stands for (Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal, and Environmental).
• This model helps business analysts to evaluate all the external factors which can possibly impression their organization and determine how to address them.

SWOT

• SWOT is a full form of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
• This technique helps you to find areas of both strength and weakness. It also allows for the proper allocation of resources.

MoSCoW

• Must or Should, Could or Would process is a long-form of MosCow.
• This technique allows prioritization of requirements by presenting a framework in which every individual requirement should be evaluated relative to the others.

CATWOE

• CATWOE is an acronym for Customers, Actors, Transformation Process, World View, Owner, and Environmental.
• This technique helps you to recognize processes that may be affected by any action the business undertakes.

The 5 Whys

• This technique is a backbone of both Six Sigma and business analysis techniques.
• It consists of leading questions that allow business analysts to single out the root cause of an issue by asking why such a situation arises.

Six Thinking Hats

This process helps you to consider alternate perspectives and ideas. The ‘six hats’ in a technique which his categorized as:

• Green (creative thinking)
• Blue talk about big-picture overview.
• White (logical, data-driven thinking)
• Yellow (positive thinking, which mainly focused on pros)
• Red (emotion-based reactions)
• Black (opposing thinking, which is focused on cons)

Role Of An IT Business Analyst

The role of a Business analyst starts from defining and scoping the business areas of the organization, then eliciting the requirements, analyzing and documenting the requirements, communicating these requirements to the appropriate stakeholders, identifying the right solution and then validating the solution to find if the requirements meet the expected standards.

Software Development Life Cycle

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a process followed in a software project, within a software organization. It consists of a detailed plan describing how to develop, maintain, replace and alter or enhance specific software. It defines a methodology for improving the quality of software and the overall development process.

• SDLC is a process used by IT analysts in order to develop or redesign high quality software system, which meets both the customer and the real-world requirement.
• It takes into consideration all the associated aspects of software testing, analysis and post-process maintenance.

The important phases of SDLC are depicted in the following illustration −

Planning Stage

Every activity must start with a plan. Failing to plan is planning to fail. The degree of planning differs from one model to another, but it’s very important to have a clear understanding of what we are going to build by creating the system’s specifications.

Defining Stage

In this phase, we analyze and define the system’s structure. We define the architecture, the components, and how these components fit together to produce a working system.

Designing Stage

In system design, the design functions and operations are described in detail, including screen layouts, business rules, process diagrams and other documentation. The output of this stage will describe the new system as a collection of modules or subsystems.

Building Stage

This is the development phase. We start code generation based on the system’s design using compilers, interpreters, debuggers to bring the system to life.

Implementation

Implementation is a part of the Building Stage. In this phase, we start code generation based on the system’s design using compilers, interpreters, debuggers to bring the system to life.

Testing Stage

As different parts of the system are completed; they are put through a series of tests. it is tested against the requirements to make sure that the product is actually solving the needs addressed during the requirement phase.

• Test plans and test cases are used to identify bugs and to ensure that the system is working according to the specifications.
• In this phase, different types of testing like unit testing, manual testing, acceptance testing and system testing is done.

Defect Tracking In Testing

Software test reports are used to communicate the results of the executed test plans. This being the case, a report should contain all test information that pertains to the current system being tested. The completeness of reports will be verified in walkthrough sessions.

Testing for a project seeks to accomplish two main goals −

• Detect failures and defects in the system.
• Detect inconsistency between requirements and implementation.

The following flowchart depicts the Defect Tracking Process −

To achieve the main goals, the testing strategy for the proposed system will usually consist of four testing levels.

These are unit testing, integration testing, acceptance testing, and regression testing.

The following subsections outline these testing levels, which development team roles are responsible for developing and executing them, and criteria for determining their completeness.

Deployment

After the test phase ends, the system is released and enters the production environment. Once the product is tested and ready to be deployed it is released formally in the appropriate market. Sometime product deployment happens in stages as per the organization’s business strategy.

The product may first be released in a limited segment and tested in the real business environment (UAT- User acceptance testing). Then based on the feedback, the product may be released as it is or with suggested enhancements in the targeting market segment.

Role of Business Analyst during SDLC Process

As we can see the below diagram, BA is involved in driving business requirement and converting them to solution requirements.

He is involved in translating the solution features into software requirements. Then leads in analysis and designing phase, dictates in code development, then follows the testing phase during bug fixing as a change agent in the project team and ultimately fulfills the customer requirements.

Business Analysis – Roles

The role of a business analyst in an IT Project can be multi–fold. It is possible for project team members to have multiple roles and responsibilities. In some projects, the BA may take on the roles of the Business Intelligence Analyst, Database Designer, Software Quality Assurance Specialist, Tester, and/or Trainer when there are limited resources available.

It is also possible for a Project Coordinator, or an Application Development Lead, or a Developer to take on the role of the Business Analyst in specific projects.

Business Analysis overlaps heavily with analysis of requirements of the business to function as usual and to optimize how they function. Some examples of Business Analysis are −

• Creating Business Architecture
• Preparing a Business Case
• Conducting Risk assessment
• Requirements Elicitation
• Business Process Analysis
• Documentation of Requirements

CONCLUSION:

• Business analysis is a research discipline that helps you to find the business needs and defining solutions to business problems
• It helps you to understand the structure and the dynamics of the company
• Here are the steps for Business Analysis: 1) Enterprise analysis 2) Requirement planning and Management 3) Requirement Elicitation 4) Requirement analysis and Documentation 5) Requirement Communication and 6) Solution Evolution and Validation.
• Important business analysis techniques are: 1) MOST 2) PESTLE 3) SWOT 4) MoSCoW 5) CATWOE 6) The 5 Whys and, 7) Six Thinking Hats
• Most is a short form of Mission, Objectives, Strategies
• SWOT is a full form of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
• Must or Should, Could or Would process is a long-form of MosCow
• CATWOE is an acronym for Customers, Actors, Transformation Process, World View, Owner, and Environmental
• This technique is a backbone of both Six Sigma and business analysis techniques
• This process helps you to consider alternate perspectives and ideas