Invaders

In this new series of discussion about anything technical and useful to Invaders, Kottai has started sharing his first hand experience about Business Analyst job profile. Let us hear from the expert

Dear Invis ,
Good to write the first Tech talk. Topic for today is “Demystifying Business Analyst (BA)”

Who can be a BA?
Answer is pretty simple “Anyone one could be a BA”. Generally as per market, A person with MBA could become a BA easily. Most companies prefer people with B.E and MBA . They call them as Techno Domain; we shall talk about it little later.

Non MBA, who have extensive industry knowledge can also be an BA, but they lack certain skills like, they will know what to be done “ but does not know “How to be done”. This is the place where people with BE CS score above them.

What BA does?
Simply check mails??? Or work with excel sheets that’s what people generally perceive BA‘s work. It untrue, BA are generally responsible for the whole project or a module, they are sole responsible for the functionality of the software. For example take any banking system or a mortgage system , all calculations and formulae should be clearly obtained or arrived and should be validated once the coding is done , this is what they call as Functional Testing.

So initially first work of the BA would be requirements Gathering, next would be analyzing them.

Generally clients will not elucidate the requirements as we want, for e.g. Customer simply say they want to capture the customer details , it’s the role of a BA to break the general requirement (customer details) to more detailed one (such as Customer Name varchar(100), age number(3), address, etc etc.) .

What is Domain, does it require for a BA?
The paragraphs talked about BA of generic type, they could work on any client project.

But they fail in projects that deal with an Unknown domain e.g. Insurance, For this the BA should be aware of Insurance terms, business process, basically he should understand the insurance jargons the customer speaks. There are many domains to be specialized like Insurance, Banking, Health care, Logistics, Supply chain etc BA can choose one domain and obtain extensive knowledge in it. There are many international bodies who conduct certification in various domains for instance AII/AICPCU , LOMA , CII are some of the exams that could be taken to specialize in Insurance

Other Responsibilities
Developing SRS (software requirement specification)
Functional specifications
Use cases
Functional test cases
Review
UAT (User acceptance testing)
Proposal development
I love the job of a BA, where responsibility and accountability is very high. And sense of satisfaction is huge.