1. Who is Business Analyst?

Answer: A business analyst works as a bridge between different stakeholders in an organization. He connects with the different stakeholders of an organization to clarify and finalize the requirements, helps the project team in project planning, designing and finally validating the developed components. He is the person who possesses adequate domain knowledge and can sort the business needs amongst the stakeholders who belong to different domains.

2. Name some of the documents that a business analyst use to handle?

Answer: Following are some of the common documents that a business analyst use to handle:

• Project vision document
• Use cases
• Requirement Management Plan
• User stories
• Requirement Traceability Matrix (RTM)
• Business Requirement Document
• System Requirement Specification (SRS)/ System Requirement Document (SRD)
• Test case
• Functional Requirement Specification (FRS)/ Functional Specification Document (FSD)

3. What is SRS and what are its key elements?

Answer: A System Requirements Specification (SRS) or a Software Requirements Specification is a document or set of documents that describe the features of a system or software application. It includes a variety of elements which define the intended functionality required by the stakeholders and customer to satisfy the end users.

In addition to that, an SRS provides a high-level idea of the system and its behavior, the main supported business processes, the assumptions and the key performance parameters for the system. The key elements of an SRS are:

• Scope of Work
• Functional Requirements
• Non-Functional Requirements
• Dependencies
• Data Model
• Assumptions
• Constraints
• Acceptance Criteria

4. What is a requirement?

Answer: A requirement is a targeted solution to achieve specific business goals or objectives. It is an input to various stages of SDLC. This is a basis of a project which must be validated by the stakeholders and business users before implementation. Besides that, every requirement needs to be properly documented for future reference purpose.
 

5. What is Use case?

Answer: A use case is a diagrammatic representation of a system which describes how a user uses a system to accomplish a goal. It is an integral part of software engineering and software modelling technique which defines the targeted features and the resolution of any possible errors which a user may encounter.
 

6. What are the steps that you need to follow to design a use case?

Answer: The steps in designing use cases are:

• Identify the users of the system
• Creating a user profile for each category of users. This includes all roles that the users may play and relevant to the system.
• Identify essential goals associated with each role. Also, identifying the significant roles.
• Creating use cases for every goal associated for a use case template. This also includes maintaining the same abstraction level for the entire use case. Higher level use case steps are considered as goals for the lower level.
• Structuring the use cases
• Reviewing and validating the users
   

7. What is Scope creep and how can you avoid scope creep?

Answer: Scope creep, or requirement creep is a term that relates to the uncontrolled changes or deviation in the project’s scope within the same resource range for example within same schedule and budget of the project. It’s an indication of poor project management and a viable risk to a project. Some of the possible causes of scope creep are:

• Poor communication between the project’s stakeholders
• Improper documentation of the project’s requirements

Scope creep could be avoided by:

• Clear documentation about the project scope
• Following proper change management
• Prior intimation about the effects of the changes to the associated parties
• Proper documentation of the new requirements in the project log
• Refrain from Gold Plating which means adding extra features to the existing functionalities

9. What is Gap Analysis?

Answer: Gap Analysis is a technique to analyze the gap between the existing system and functionalities, and the targeted system. Here gap means the amount of task or change that may be required to get the intended result. It’s a performance level comparison between the present and the proposed functionalities.

10. What is requirement prioritization? What are the different techniques used for it?

Answer: Requirements prioritization is the process to allocate requirements based on the business urgency to different phases, schedule, cost, etc.

There are various techniques which are used for requirements prioritization:

• MoSCoW Technique
• Requirements Ranking Method
• 100-dollar method
• Kano Analysis & More
• Five Whys

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11. What is the requirement elicitation technique?

Answer: Requirement elicitation is the process of requirement gathering from stakeholders, users, and customers by conducting meetings, questionnaires, interviews, brainstorming prototyping, sessions, etc.
 

12. What is the fundamental difference between a requirement and need in a business analysis perspective?

Answer: Needs are high-level definitions of the future goals of a business. Whereas, Requirements are the representation of the detailed description of that business needs.
 

13. What are non-functional requirements and how do you capture them?

Answer: Non-functional requirements represent the performance level characteristics like how fast it can respond, how smooth is a user interface, security, etc. of the application under development (AUD).
No functional requirements are captured in the SRS document in its designated section.
 

14. What are the skills that a business analyst must possess?

Answer: We can broadly categorize the skills of a business analyst in three types:

• Fundamental skills
• Technical skills
• Business Analysis skills

15. How will you define a good quality requirement as a business analyst?

Answer: We can measure the quality of a requirement using SMART rule. As per this rule, a good quality requirement should be:
Specific: The requirement should be specific and could be documented properly
Measurable: Different parameters can measure the success criteria of the requirement
Attainable: The requirement should be feasible within the scope of the given resources
Relevant: The requirement must be in line with the project’s business case
Timely: The requirement should be communicated early in the project lifecycle

16. Which documents are used to capture non-functional requirements?

Answer: There are two documents that are used to capture non-functional requirements, and they are:

• SDD (System Design Document)
• FRD (Functional Requirement Document)

17. What is alternate flow in use case diagram?

Answer: It is an alternative solution or activity in a use case that should be followed in case of any failure in the system.
 

18. Define Personas?

Answer: Personas represents User-Centered Design methodologies. To enable an application capable of performing on a demographic basis, fictional characters are conceptualized by the business analysts and based on their possible demographic specific behavior scenarios are created during design. 

19. What is an activity diagram and what are the important elements of it?

Answer: An activity diagram is a visual representation of the workflow of a business use case. This diagram shows various activities that take place in an organization in different departments like HR, Sales, Accounts, etc. The activity diagram highlights the differences in the departments.
The important elements in Activity diagram are initial nodes, activities, control flows, decisions, a fork, guard conditions, join and end nodes.
 

20. What is UML modelling?

Answer: UML stands for Unified Modelling Language. It is a standard that the industry uses for documenting, constructing and visualizing various components of a system. This modelling standard is primarily used for software development. However, it is also used for describing job roles, organizational functions, and business processes. Some of the important diagrams that BAs use as part of UML are the class diagram, state diagrams and use cases.

21. What are the best practices to follow while writing a use case?

Answer: Some of the best practices to write a use case are as follows:

• To become a valid use case, the use case must provide some value back to the actor or stakeholder.
• The functional and non-functional requirements must be captured appropriately in the use case.
• The use case must have one or more alternate flow along with the main flow.
• The use case should only describe what the system does and not how it is done which means it will not describe the design. It will act as a black box from the viewpoint of an actor.
• The use case should not have any, i.e. it should be stand alone.

22. What is the difference between exception flow and alternate flow?

Answer: Alternate flow are the alternative actions that can be performed apart for the main flow and can be considered as an optional flow.
Exception flow is the path traversed in case of any exception or error.
 

23. Do you think a business analyst should be involved in testing?

Answer: Yes. Because a business analyst understands the overall system requirements and challenges associated with it very well. Hence, he can be instrumental during the testing phase to run it appropriately and resolve any system related query.

24. What does INVEST stand for?

Answer: INVEST stands for –

• Independent
• Negotiable
• Valuable
• Estimable
• Sized Appropriately
• Testable

It can assist project managers and technical team to deliver quality products/services.
 

25. What is Pareto Analysis?

Answer: Pareto Analysis which is also known as 80/20 rule is a decision-making technique. It is a useful technique for defect resolution and quality control. As per this analysis rule, 20 % causes create 80 % effects in a system, which is why it is named as 80/20 rule.

26. What is BPMN and what are its basic elements?

Answer: BPMN is the Business Process Model and Notation. It is a graphical representation of business processes.

There are five basic elements of BPMN, and they are –

• Flow Objects
• Data
• Connecting Objects
• Swimlanes
• Artifacts

27. What is Kano analysis?

Answer: Kano Analysis is used to analyze a system regarding its requirements to identify its impact on customers’ satisfaction.

28. What are the different types of actors you know in use case diagram?

Answer: There are mainly two types of actors can be depicted in a Use case-

• Primary actors – It starts the process
• Secondary actors – It assists the primary actor

Moreover, we can categorized actors into four types:

• Human
• System
• Hardware
• Timer

29. What are the different types of the gap that a business analyst can encounter during gap analysis?

Answer: There are mainly four types of gap –

• Performance Gap – The difference between expected performance and the actual performance
• Product/Market Gap – The gap between budgeted sales and actual sales is termed as product/market gap
• Profit Gap – The variance between a targeted and actual profit of the company.
• Manpower Gap – The gap between the required number and quality of workforce and actual strength in the organization

30. What is Benchmarking?

Answer: Benchmarking is about measuring the performance of an organization to compete in the industry. In this process, a company may measure its policies, performance, rules and other measures.

31. How do you decide that as a business analyst you have gathered all the requirements?

Answer: We can conclude that all the requirements are gathered only when –

• It is validated and approved by the business users.
• The requirements are appropriately aligned with the project’s business requirements.
• The requirements can be implemented with the available resources.
• All the key business stakeholders are aligned with the elicited requirements.

32. How do you perform requirement gathering?

Answer: The requirement gathering process is generally divided into multiple steps which are agnostic to the SDLC cycle. Each step involves:

• specific tasks to perform
• principles to follow
• documents to produce

The steps are as follows:

Step 1: Gather Background Information – This may include collecting background information about the project, analyzing any potential risk associated with the project. Techniques like PESTLE analysis, Porter’s Five forces framework could be used for this purpose.

Step 2: Identify Stakeholders – They are the decision makers of a project and approver for requirements and priorities. Stakeholders may range from project owners to senior managers, end users, and even competitors.

Step 3: Discover Business Objectives – This is to understand the business needs of the project before going deep into the project. SWOT analysis, Benchmarking, analyzing business objectives SMART and listing business objectives are some of the techniques used for this purpose.

Step 4: Evaluate Options – This is to identify the options to achieve business objectives. Impact analysis, Risk analysis, Cost-benefit analysis are some of the methods which are used for this purpose.

Step 5: Scope Definition – A scope is a project development goal which is set based on the business objectives. A scope definition document is

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Given below are business analyst interview questions