Role: Business Analyst
Business Analyst (BA) acts as the bridge between the business and IT departments. He understands the technologies the business.
Relationships
Performs:Responsible for:
Additionally Performs: Modifies:
Main Description

Business Analysts (BA) act as the bridge between the business and IT departments, by smoothing the way as corporate policy moves from definition to execution inside a software application. Business Analysts must translate policy into a formal specification acceptable to developers, and must validate the formal specification with policy managers who may not understand the language of the specification.

Depending on their level of technical knowledge, Business Analysts may perform tasks that are described as developer tasks. However, generally business analysts do not write code. In a BRMS a BA also represents a type of user profile who is responsible for modeling business rule application projects

Properties
Multiple Occurrences
Optional
PlannedYes
Staffing
Skills

An analyst needs the following knowledge, skills, and abilities:

  • Expertise in identifying and understanding problems and opportunities
  • Ability to articulate the needs that are associated with the key problem to be solved or opportunity to be realized
  • Ability to collaborate effectively with the extended team through collaborative working sessions, workshops, JAD sessions and other techniques.
  • Good communication skills, verbally and in writing
  • Knowledge of the business and technology domains or the ability to quickly absorb and understand such information

Assignment Approaches

This role can be assigned in the following ways:

  • On small, agile teams this role is often shared among several team members that also perform other roles.  See Guideline: Self Organize Work Assignments and Guideline: Staffing a Project for more information on this approach.
  • One (or more) team member(s) performs this role exclusively. This commonly adopted approach is suitable for complex requirements that are difficult to gather.
  • One staff (or more) team member(s) performs both this role and the Tester role. This is a good option for smaller or resource-constrained test teams.

This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the
Eclipse Public License v1.0 which accompanies this distribution.

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