Business Analyst - Interview Question
Business Analyst - Interview Question
Business Analyst - Interview Question
Answers
Top business analyst interview questions fall under the generic category and could be
asked as a part of business analyst interview questions for any career levels.
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.
6. What are the steps that you need to follow to design a use case?
Answer: The steps in designing use cases are:
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:
BRD SRS
It is a high-level functional specification of It is a high level functional and technical
the software. specification of the software
It is a formal document to describe the
It describes the functional and non-functional
requirement provided by the client (written,
requirements of the software to be developed
verbal)
The System Architect creates it as it needs
The Business Analyst creates it after their
technical expertise. Though sometimes Bas too
direct interaction with the clients
can create it.
It is derived based on the requirements and
It is derived from the BRS
client interaction
There are various techniques which are used for requirements prioritization:
MoSCoW Technique
Requirements Ranking Method
100-dollar method
Kano Analysis & More
Five Whys
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
For each of the above categories a business analyst should possess some skills as
mentioned below:
Skill
Skills
category
Problem Solving
Fundamental Communication
skills Management skills
Research
IT skills like MS Office, Operating systems,
Technical skills Programming languages, Knowledge of
database, SDLC knowledge, Domain knowledge
Requirement Elicitation
Documentation
Business Analysis
skills Decision making
Creativity
Analytical skills
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.
Independent
Negotiable
Valuable
Estimable
Sized Appropriately
Testable
It can assist project managers and technical team to deliver quality products/services.
Flow Objects
Data
Connecting Objects
Swimlanes
Artifacts
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-
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 –
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 –
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 used to detail the goals for each
phase of a project.
Step 6: Business Analyst Delivery Plan – Based on the project scope, stakeholders
availability and project methodology a document called business analyst is created at this
step. The document provides information on deliverables with their timeline.
Step 7: Define Project Requirements – In this step, two types of documents are used –
Functional requirement document and Non-functional requirement document. Based on
the development methodology to be used in the project the business analyst needs to
clarify the requirements with the stakeholders by interviewing them on the requirements
and get the sign off on the same.
Step 9: Evaluate Value Added By Project – This is the continuous evaluation of the
project to evaluate whether the business objectives implementation correctly meets the
business needs outcome and timeline.
33. Why it is necessary for a business analyst to get involved during the
implementation of requirements?
Answer: Gaining domain knowledge and providing an analytical solution are the two
major criteria of a business analyst. Hence, during actual implementation of a requirement
or use case a business analyst can help to resolve many business strategies related
problems that may arise during the implementation stage. On the contrary, they can learn
from the problems which may help them to provide the solution in similar scenarios and
also help to gain their domain knowledge.
34. What are the problems that a business analyst may face?
Answer: From the initiation to post implementation of a project a business analyst may
face the following problems –
Brainstorming
Interviews
Observation
Document Analysis
Focus Groups
Requirements Workshops
Interface Analysis
Survey or Questionnaire
Prototyping
37. Do you think the role of a Business Analyst is a need for a project?
Answer: Yes, because the role of a Business analyst is extremely beneficial from the
kick-off to the implementation of a project. Here are the top 5 reasons:
During the project kick-off session, there are high possibilities that some
technical queries come up from stakeholder and clients. As we don’t involve the
technical project team during this phase and immediate answering is essential,
a business analyst may play a pivotal role to answer those queries.
The next phase after the kick-off session essentially involves some gap
analysis, business process analysis, documentation, SOW review, project
scheduling and of course preparing requirement specification documents.
During the development and testing phase, a business analyst can play a
significant role to resolve any requirement related queries from the project
teams. Besides that, he can validate whether the requirements are correctly
implemented and tested considering different functional and non-functional
scenarios.
In a waterfall model, new requirement or modification of requirements can be
asked from stakeholder considering changing business needs. In this case
business analyst is the person who can handle this change request with proper
validation and analysis.
Business analysis – recognizes business needs and determine the solutions to that
problems. Tools and techniques like SWOT, PESTEL, CATWOE, MOST, FIVE WHY, etc.
are used for business analysis.
Business analytics – handles data and analyze data to get insights into a business.
Finally, it generates reports. Mainly four types of business analytics are used, and they
are – descriptive analytics, decisive analytics, prescriptive analytics, and predictive
analytics Tools and technologies like Big data, BI is used for this purpose.
40. What are the effective skills to solve any problem as a business analyst?
Answer:
Leadership skill
Excellent communication skill
Problem analysis skill
Technical knowledge
Domain knowledge
The BA is expected work collaborate with product owner and developers to elicit
requirements. The BA also must work to develop realistic functional
requirements.
The BA must do requirement elicitation in an iterative way
The BA must make requirement specifications, data models and business rules
as much lightweight as possible.
The BA must be technically sound so that he can understand how the
components of the system interact with each other. Besides that, he must
understand the agile terminologies as he acts as the middleman between the
customer and the project team.
The BA must concentrate on the just-enough requirement and test criteria to
meet the just in time delivery goal of an agile project.
Forming
Storming
Norming
Performing
Scrum
Lean software development and Extreme Programming (XP)
Feature-driven development (FDD)
Crystal Methodology
DSDM (Dynamic Software Development Method)
Though we have categorized the above business analyst interview questions based on
the experience levels, however, it could be a mixed and match for any career level
depending on the organization and their requirement.