Business Analyst Interview Questions

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Business Analyst Interview Questions and Answers

Q1) Who is a Business Analyst?

Ans: A Business Analyst acts as a bridge between the stakeholders in an organization. He/She interacts with the different stakeholders of an organization to discuss and finalize the requirements, helps the project team in project discussions, designing, planning, and validating the developed components. A person who has the appropriate knowledge of different domains and can able to handle the needs of stakeholders.

Q2) What are the skills a business analyst must possess?

Ans: The skills of Business Analysts are classified into three types:

  • Technical skills: This includes basic IT skills such as Programming languages, MS Office, Operating system, SDLC, Domain knowledge, Database knowledge
  • Fundamental skills: It includes Communication skills, Research, Management, problem-solving
  • Business Analyst skills: It includes Documentation, Creativity, Decision making, Analytic skills, and requirement elicitation.

Q3) Name some documents that a business analyst should handle?

Ans: Some of the documents that a business analyst should handle are as follows:

  • Use cases
  • Project vision document
  • Use stories
  • Requirement Management plan
  • Business Requirement Document
  • Requirement Traceability Matrix
  • Test cases
  • System Requirement Specification(SRS)/System Requirement Document (SRD)
  • Functional Requirement Specification (FRS)/Functional Requirement Document(FRD)

Q4) Define Requirement?

Ans: A Requirement is a targeted solution for achieving certain business objectives. It is a statement provided by a stakeholder about what they need to solve or respond to a specific business need. Other than that, every requirement should be clearly documented for further reference.

Q5) Define SRS?

Ans: System Requirement Specification or Software Requirement Specification (SRS) is a detailed and structured requirement document that includes the functional requirements, non-functional requirements along with the use cases that the software must fulfill according to the needs of stakeholders to satisfy the end-users.

Q6) What are the key elements of SRS?

Ans: The key elements of SRS are as follows:

  • Scope of the project
  • Functional requirements
  • Non-Functional requirements
  • Dependencies
  • Data models
  • Assumptions
  • Constraints 
  • Acceptance criteria

Q7) What is the use case?

Ans: The use case is a diagram that provides a high-level description of how the user can use the system or software to accomplish their requirements. It is an integral part of software modeling techniques that defines the features and solutions for the possible errors that a user can experience.

Q8) What are the essential steps needed to follow to design a use case?

Ans: To design a use case, use the following steps:

  • Identify the users
  • Creating a user profile for different categories of users. It includes the user roles and relevant to the system
  • Identify the essential goals associated with each role and also identify the significant roles
  • Creating use cases for every goal associated with a use case template. It includes maintaining the same abstract for the entire use case.
  • Structuring the use case
  • Reviewing and validating the users

Q9) Differentiate between BRD, SRS, and FRS?

Ans: 

BRD

SRS

FRS

It includes High-level business requirements and stakeholder requirements

It includes detailed functional requirements, non-functional requirements, and use cases

It includes Functional requirements, data flow, and UML diagrams

It was created by Business Analyst

It was created by BusinessSystem Analyst

It was created by Business/System Analysts, Implementation leads

It was used by the upper and middle management of an organization

It was used by the Project managers, SMEs, technical and implementation leads

It was used by the technical leads, development teams, and testing teams

It was prepared at the initial phase

It was prepared at the planning phase

It was prepared at the planning phase

Eg: Improve efficiency by monitoring the employee time in office

Eg: proposed software contains the following modules: Login, Administrator, Employee, and Reporting

 

Eg: Login module contains fields like, Enter the username, Enter Password, and Submit button.

Q10) Define Requirement prioritization? And What are the different techniques used for it?

Ans: Requirement prioritization is the process of allocating the requirements based on the business priority to different phases, schedule, cost, etc.

The different techniques that are used for requirement prioritization are as follows:

  • Moscow technique
  • Requirements Ranking method
  • 100 dollar method
  • Five Whys
  • Kano Analysis and more

Q11) Define Gap Analysis?

Ans: Gap Analysis is a process used to study the gap between the existing system and functionalities, and the targeted system. The gap means the number of tasks that are required to get the specified results. It is the best way to compare the present and the proposed functionalities at the performance level.

Q12) What are the different types of gaps in Gap analysis?

Ans: There are four types of gaps. They are as follows:

  • Performance gap: It is the difference between expected performance and the actual performance
  • Product gap: It is the gap between actual sale and budgeted sale
  • Profit gap: It is the variation between targeted profit and actual profit of an organization
  • Manpower gap: It is a gap between the required quality workforce and the actual workforce.

Q13) How do you define a good quality requirement as a business analyst?

Ans: The SMART rule is used to measure and define a good quality requirement. The SMART rule is

  • Specific: The requirement should be specific and clearly documented.
  • Measurable: Different parameters can measure the success criteria of the requirement
  • Attainable: The requirement must attain the scope of the given resources
  • Relevant: The requirements should be in line with the projects business cases
  • Time-bound: The requirement should meet early in the project lifecycle

Q14) What is the fundamental difference between need and requirement from a business analysis perspective?

Ans: A requirement is defined as the condition or capabilities required by stakeholders to achieve the objectives. Whereas, a need is a high-level representation of the future goals of a business.

Q15) Define the requirement elicitation technique?

Ans: Requirement elicitation is a process of gathering requirements from the stakeholders, users, and customers through the meetings, sessions, protocols, etc.

Q16) Define UML modeling?

Ans: Unified Modelling Language (UML) is a standard model used in the industry for constructing, documenting, and visualizing various components of the system. It is used for software development and also used for organizational functions, describing job roles, and business processes.

Q17) What is an activity diagram?

Ans: An activity diagram is a visual representation of the workflow of a business use case. It includes various activities to be performed by different departments like sales, HR, Accounts, etc. The most important elements of this diagram are activities, initial nodes, join nodes, control flows, decisions, guard conditions, and end nodes.

Q18) Define Personas?

Ans: Personas represent User-centered Design methodologies. They are detailed profiles of fictional characters that represent a specific segment of users within targeted demographics. For this reason, Analysts and Designers typically use personas together with market segmentation.

Q19) What are the documents used to capture the non-functional requirements? 

Ans: Two documents are used to capture non-functional requirements. They are as follows:

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

Q20) Name some non-functional requirements?

Ans: Non-functional requirements represent the performance level characteristics like How fast the application can respond, How smooth is a user interface, security, etc. of the Application under development (AUD). 

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Q21) What are the differences between an exception flow and alternate flow?

Ans: The exception flow is an unintended path through the system usually as a result of missing information or system availability issues. It represents an undesirable path to the user. Whereas, alternate flow describes a scenario other than the main flow that leads to a user completing the goal. It is often termed as an optional flow.

Q22) Define Pareto Analysis?

Ans: Pareto Analysis is a technique in decision making used for the preference of a limited number of tasks that produce a significant overall effect. The idea of performing 20% of work can generate 80% of the benefit of doing the entire job. And hence it is termed as the 80/20 rule.

Q23) Define Kano Analysis?

Ans: Kano is an approach of prioritizing the features on a product roadmap based on the degree to which they are likely to satisfy the customers.

Q24) What is Benchmarking?

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

Q25) What are the different types of actors you know in the use case diagram?

Ans: There are two types of actors that we can identify in the use case diagram. They are:

  • Primary actors
  • Secondary actors

Further, these are categorized into four types. They are:

  • Human
  • System
  • Hardware
  • Timer

Q26) What are the best practices to follow for writing a use case?

Ans: The best practices to follow for writing a use case are as follows:

  • The use case must provide some value back to the stakeholder, to be a valid use case.
  • The functional and Non-functional requirement should be mentioned properly in the use case
  • It must contain one or more alternate flow along with the main flow
  • It should be standalone
  • It should describe only what the system does and not how it should be done, it means the use case should not describe the design

Q27) Do you think a business analyst should be involved in testing?

Ans: Yes, Because business analysts can understand the system requirements and challenges associated with it. Also, he/she can perform during the testing phase to run properly and can resolve the queries.

Q28) Define BPMN? And what are its basic elements?

Ans: Business process model and notation (BPMN) is a graphical description for identifying the business operations in a business process model. There are five basic elements in BPMN. They are as follows: 

  • Flow objects
  • Connecting objects
  • Data
  • Artifacts
  • Swimlanes

Q29) What are the challenges that a business analyst may face?

Ans: From the beginning of the project initiation and implementation a business  analyst may face the following problems:

  • Employee related issues
  • Access issues
  • Technology-related issues
  • Business model errors
  • Business policies related issues

Q30) How do business analysts conclude that all requirements were gathered?

Ans: It can be concluded that all the requirements are gathered only when:

  • It is validated and approved by the user
  • The requirements are properly aligned with the project’s business requirement
  • All the business stakeholders aligned with the elicited requirement
  • The requirements can be implemented with the available resources

Q31) What do you know about kanban?

Ans: Kanban is a tool that helps the agile team to guide and manage the work as it progresses through the process. It is used to describe the current development status and works as a scheduling system in agile.

Q32) What is an Agile manifesto?

Ans: Agile manifesto is a software guide that describes the Agile development principles that ensure iterative solutions.

Q33) What are the different types of Agile methodologies?

Ans: The different types of Agile methodologies are as follows:

  • Scrum
  • Feature-driven development
  • Crystal methodology
  • Lean software development and extreme programming (XP)
  • Dynamic software development method (DSDM)

Q34) What are the four key phases of business development?

Ans: The four key phases of business development are as follows:

  • Forming
  • Storming
  • Norming
  • Performing

Q35) What are the essential qualities of an agile BA?

Ans: The essential qualities of an agile BA are as follows:

  • The BA has expected work to collaborate with product owners and developers to elicit requirements. It must work to develop real functional requirements.
  • He/she has to do requirement elicitation in an iterative way
  • He/she must build requirement specifications, data models, and business rules as much lightweight as possible.
  • He/she must be technically clear so that he/she can understand how the components of the system interact with each other. Besides that, he/she must understand the agile terminologies as he/she acts as the middleman between the customer and the project team.
  • He/she must concentrate on the just-enough requirement and test criteria to meet the just in time delivery goal of an agile project.

Q36) What does INVEST stand for?

Ans: INVEST stands for:

  • Independent
  • Negotiable
  • Valuable
  • Estimable
  • Sized appropriately
  • Testable

Q37) Explain the requirement elicitation strategy?

Ans: The requirement elicitation is a process of collecting all the requirements related to a system from the end-users, stakeholders, and customers. As per the BABOK guide, nine methods can be a part of the requirement elicitation process. They are as follows:

  • Observation
  • Brainstorming
  • Document analysis
  • Focus groups
  • Interface analysis
  • Interviews
  • Questionnaires
  • Prototyping
  • Requirements workshops

Q38) Define Business model analysis?

Ans: Business Model Analysis is a technique to analyze whether a business is suitable and valuable regarding economic, social, and other perspectives. It provides the foundation for any required business model modification and innovation for an organization.

Q39) What is the difference between Business Analytics and Business analysis?

Ans: Business Analytics: It handles the data, analyzes the data, and then generates the reports. There are mainly four types of Business Analytics used. They are as follows:

  • Descriptive Analytics
  • Decisive Analytics
  • Prescriptive Analytics
  • Predictive Analytics tools and technologies such as BigData, BI are used for this process

Business analysis: It identifies the business needs and determines the solution to those issues. Tools and techniques like  PESTEL, SWOT, CATWOE, FIVE WHY, etc. are used for business analysis.

Q40) What are the effective skills used to solve any problem as a business analyst?

Ans: The effective skills used to solve any problem as a business analyst are as follows:

  • Problem analysis skills
  • Technical knowledge
  • Domain knowledge
  • Excellent communication skills
  • Leadership skills

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