Business Analyst Questions

Use case diagram, activity diagram, Collaboration diagram. 

Use case diagram :

It describes the business environment. Its primary goal is to show the series of events and actions within any given process that will be performed by an actor.  

Activity diagram:

The activity diagram is important because it gives an outline of the work flow within the business as well as the activities and action completed. 

For instance with a company, there is likely to be more than one department. In such a case each department, will have different access levels to the system. 

So if there’s a Medical, HR and Accounts team they will only have access to screens that relate to each. 

The activity diagram will highlight the differences within the departments which will be very helpful for developers when they are designing and coding. 

Collaboration diagram:

A collaboration diagram, also called a communication diagram or interaction diagram, is an illustration of the relationships and interactions among software objects in the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The concept is more than a decade old although it has been refined as modeling paradigms have evolved. 

The business analyst must understand IT and also has to understand the stakeholder’s needs. 

A systems analyst has the ability to look at a program or utility and see the code. They can go in and pinpoint where changes need to be made. 

Generally a business analyst covers several stages in Software Development Life Cycle.

Like:  Client Consulting, Client Requirement Study, Planning for business needs, Business Requirement Documenting, Work on functional requirement, Prepare test data with inputs from end users, Document use case scenarios, Help Testing team with test plan and testing, Help end users with user acceptance testing UAT, Go live and post production support tasks.

The flow chart gives a clear graphical representation of an implemented process. This makes the system simple to understand for all persons involved in the project. 

The common tools that can be used by a business analyst are MS Visio, MS word, MS Excel, Power point, Quality center/test director MS Project. There may be tools that are client specific also, but these will be supplied the client. 

The most important responsibilities of a business systems analysts are as a communication conduit between the stakeholders and the team 

Requirements gathering, functional design and business process, change management etc are very critical tasks for a business analyst.

Pareto analysis is otherwise known as the 80/20 rule. It stipulates that 80%of problems will arise from 20% of causes – that few factors can create big problems.