Interview Questions and Answers

Business Analysis is the set of analysis, tasks, knowledge, and techniques required to identify business needs, requirements and determine solutions to enterprise business problems. The general definition is similar, the practices and procedures may vary in different industries.

In Information technology industry, solutions often include a systems development requirements, but may also consist of process or organizational change.

The business analysis may also be performed to get the output of the current state of an organization or business or project. In most cases, however, business analysis is performed to define and certifify solutions that meet business needs, goals, or objectives.

A business analyst is a person who analyzes a business domain or organization and documents its requirements, business, processes, or systems, assessing the business model or its integration with technology.

However, the titles vary based on different organizations such as analyst, business analyst, business systems analyst or maybe systems analyst.

Organizations need business to grow and an analyst is required for the following reasons -

• To deploy a system in the organization there is a need to understand the basic structure and the process of the organization.
• To identify improvement areas and understand current problems in the target organization.
• To ensure that the end user, customer, and developers have a common understanding of the target organization.

SDLC stands for Software Development Life Cycle. Sometimes, it is also called System Development Life Cycle or Application Development Life Cycle. It is used to describe the process of planning, creating, testing, deploying and maintaining an information system.

The SDLC process includes mainly five phases:

• Planning
• Analysis
• Design
• Implementation
• Maintenance

Flowcharts are used to display the complete flow of systems through symbols and diagrams. It shows that what information is needed in a process and where it is stored, and how it moves through a system to accomplish an objective.

A flowchart is used to solve the problem and get the ultimate solutions.

The flowchart is essential because it makes the system easy to understand for the developers and all associated people.

The person can understand what is required to implement and how we can make it to reach the goal.

See the answer here.

• Good communication skills
• A good listener
• Quick learner
• Good analytical skills
• Problem-solving approach
• Tech Savvy
• Thinker beyond the box
• Innovative
• Written english

Risk: Risk is something which you can forecast and can handle by formulating mitigation plans.

Issue: Risk which already happened is known as Issue and needs resolution in further. Once the problem has occurred, it is solved by contingency management or Issue management.

Business analysis is an evolving profession, so a business analyst must have the necessary skills for success. He must know technical as well as nontechnical issues.

SDD stands for System Design Document.

It is a middle step dividing between business users and developers.

A use case diagram is a tool. It is used to explain the entire business environment and to understand all the business and functional use cases. It shows many related events or actions that are performed by a single actor.

UML stands for Unified Modeling Language. It is a standard in the industry which is used for visualizing, documenting, and constructing the various component of a system.

Exceptions are the unaccepted inputs, situations or result in an application.

The primary role of a business analyst is to organize requirement and document in a clear format and make sure that the whole stakeholder understand the requirements and the coordination is proper between the client and development team.

A business analyst generally uses rational tools, MS Word, MS Excel, Powerpoint, MS Project, Online UML diagram tools etc.

Business analysis is unique from financial analysis, project management, quality assurance, organizational development, testing, training, and documentation development. However, depending on the organization, a Business Analyst may perform some or all these related functions.

Business analysts who work solely on developing software systems may be called IT business analysts, technical business analysts, online business analysts, business systems analysts, or systems analysts.

A business analyst is a person who performs business analysis in an organization for analyzing the requirements of any product and understand end-to-end.

Interview response: such as, Functional Specification Documents, Technical Specification Documents, Business Requirements Documents, Use Case Diagram, etc.

The following three challenges faced by a business analyst mostly:

• Change management: It is the most difficult challenge because it happens in real time. It occurs when you get the requirements from the client side and when development is started and client will come up with some changes or enhancements.
• Cross team management: It is due to conflict between team and individuals. It requires soft skills and smartness.
• Communication problems: Sometimes this type of problem can happen. You might be good at English speaking and understanding the English language, but sometimes you get difficulty to understand a different kind of English accent. For example, Americans speak English differently, the Romans speak English differently, the Chinese speak English differently, etc.

Project management is the process of planning, organizing, motivating and controlling resources, procedures, and protocols to achieve a specific goal. It is used to coordinate scientific and daily problems.

The primary challenge to project management is to meet all the project goals like time, quality, scope, budget, etc.

• Use case diagram
• Activity diagram
• Business domain model
• Data model
• Data flow diagram
• Feature matrix
• State diagram
• Sequence diagram
• Scope model etc.

INVEST stands for Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Sized Appropriately, and Testable. It is used to help project managers and technical team to deliver quality products/services.

You should answer this question on the type and scope of the project. You can also say that a life cycle model is always selected on the basis of organizational culture and various other scenarios to develop the system.

SaaS refers to Software as a Service. It is related to cloud computing. It is different from other software bundles as you don't need this type of software to be installed on your machine. All you need is an Internet connection and a Web Browser to use it.

You have to perform: 

• Market Analysis
• Competitor Analysis
• SWOT Analysis
• Personas
• Strategic Vision and Feature Set
• Prioritize Features
• Use Cases
• SDLC
• Storyboards
• Test Cases
• Monitoring
• Scalability etc...

These are the set of measurable services and products delivered to the end customer after project completion. It is the outcome of the project.

This technique is a standard part of the Six Sigma technique. It is also known as a problem or design matrix.

Pugh Matrix is used to decide the most optimal and alternate solutions.

There are over 100 business techniques that a business analyst can select when facilitating the business. These are categorized as:

• strategic
• investigative
• analytical
• project management
• documentation
• modeling techniques

MoSCoW stands for Must or Should, Could or Would. A business analyst should implement this process by comparing every demand with other needs to prioritize the framework requirements. For example, is this requirement a must-have or should have?

SWOT or Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats Analysis is the most widely used technique in organizations for proper resource allocation.

A business analyst should be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of any corporate framework and translate them into opportunities and threats. 

With this business analyst interview question, the recruiter wants to evaluate if you are motivated enough to keep pace with emerging latest business developments and trends.

You can answer this question by including references to news and industry publications. You can also list the events and conferences you attend to connect with the business community.

SRS stands for System or Software Requirements Specification. It is a set of documents describing the features of a software application or system. 

It includes various elements required by the stakeholders and customers to convince the end-users. 

The critical aspects of an SRS are:

• Scope of Work
• Non- functional and functional requirements
• Data Model
• Dependencies
• Assumptions and Constraints
• Acceptance Criteria

BRD stands for Business Requirement Document. It is a formal contract between the organization and the client for the development of the specific product.

• BRD is a functional specification of the software whereas SRS is both BA creates it after their direct interaction with the clients.
• BRD is created by a business analyst after their direct interaction with the clients, whereas SRS is designed based on technical expertise and needs.
• SRS is derived from BRD.

A requirement is a targeted solution and representation to achieve specific business objectives. Stakeholders evaluate the project based on set conditions/requirements before its implementation. All the elements are correctly documented for reference purposes.

Needs are the high-level representation of the terms and the result.

For example, you need to get a business analyst job, and the requirements to apply for this job are resume, educational background, and interview practice.

A requirement is said to be perfect if it is SMART which stands for Specific, Measurable Attainable Relevant, and Timely.

The description of a condition should be specific, and all the parameters required for success should be measurable. All the needed resources should be attainable and relevant to the project. All the conditions/elements should be revealed timely.

It records all the requirements given by a client and ensures that all the necessities are met.