Are you going to face a Business Analyst interview or are preparing to become a Business Analyst? In this post, we present the Top 15 Business Analyst Interview Questions and Answers.
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1. Which All Documents A BA Prepares?
A business analyst may prepare several documents. As far as I am concerned, I have prepared documents as mentioned below:
- System Requirements Specifications (SRS) document
- Use case Specifications document
- Requirements Traceability Matrix
- Change Request Document
- RACI Matrix
- Gap Analysis Document
- Stakeholder Management Plan
A business analyst also creates Business cases, Business requirements documents (BRD), and other documents.
2. What Is An Acceptance Criterion?
Acceptance criteria are the set of conditions or requirements that must be met for a solution to be accepted by the stakeholders. The acceptance criteria are defined during the requirements gathering phase and should be agreed upon by the stakeholders.
For example, one of the acceptance criteria for a system could be – All the unit test cases should be run successfully by the development team and the results are submitted. There are 3 levels for Business Analysis ECBA Training, CCBA Training, and CBAP Training
3. Where Do You Capture The Acceptance Criteria?
Acceptance criteria are captured during the requirements gathering phase. These criteria define the conditions which must be met to get sign-off on the system. In the waterfall approach, it is captured in the System requirements specifications (SRS) document or FSD. In Agile approaches, we define the acceptance criteria for each user story. In a user story card, the acceptance criteria are written behind the user story cards.
4. What Are Functional Requirements?
Functional requirements represent what does the system do primarily? Do these requirements represent what does a system do? We can also say that functional requirements represent the behavior of the system. E.g. Registering to become a member of a website is an example of the functional requirement of the website.
5. What Are The Non-Functional Requirements? Give Me An Example
Non-functional requirements are the characteristics of a system. These requirements define how a system is supposed to ‘be’. The requirements relating to availability, reliability, performance, etc. are non-functional requirements. For example, a system that should support 1000 users concurrently, is an example of a non-functional requirement.
6. Why Are Non-Functional Requirements Important?
Non-functional requirements are important because they allow us to identify the need for skills/resources outside the project team. For example, if we need to design and develop an application for blind people, we need the expertise of accessibility specialists. The request for such experts needs to be raised in time to meet the project deadline.
7. How Will You Differentiate Between Functional & Non-Functional Requirements? Give Me An Example
A functional requirement is all about what a system can do whereas non-functional requirements represent characteristics of a system. Functional requirements represent system features. The way a user interacts with the system or the way the system behaves based on user actions is the key characteristics of a functional requirement. Non-functional requirements represent the attributes or characteristics of a system.
Typically, the non-functional requirements are from the following categories:
- Usability
- Performance
- Availability
- Reliability
- Interface
- The browser and other Compatibility
Examples of a functional requirement are:
- The user must log in to access member-only features.
- The user must pay annual fees to avail member features, and it is to be renewed annually.
Examples of Non-Functional Requirements:
- The site should not crash, or there should not be performance degradation even when there are 10,000 concurrent users.
- Each of the pages should load within 3 seconds.
8. Which Are The Most Common Elicitation Techniques?
The most common elicitation techniques are Interviews, Workshops, Surveys, Observation, and market analysis. There are several other elicitation techniques that are used like focus groups etc.
9. What Is A Focus Group Elicitation Technique?
A focus group is a means to elicit ideas and opinions about a specific product, service, or opportunity in an interactive group environment. These are sessions of roughly 1.5 to 3 hours in which you explore a given topic with a group of people. The number of people in a focus group meeting should be 6 to 12, as per BABOK.
The goals of this technique are:
- To explore a topic and gather insights
- To validate and test a hypothesis, concept, or subject
10. What Is A workshop, And When Do We Use It?
The workshop is a collaborative elicitation technique and is conducted to achieve a predefined goal. It is attended by key stakeholders and is usually 1 or 2 days long. A workshop may be used to generate ideas for new features or products, to reach a consensus on a topic, or to review requirements or designs.
A workshop is facilitated by a facilitator. The key roles in a workshop are as follows:
- Sponsor: This is the role of who is accountable for this event but may not participate in it.
- Facilitator: Makes sure that the workshop is conducted in a focused manner and focuses on the defined goals.
- Scribe: This is the role of who takes notes of the decision and action points
- Timekeeper: This is the role of who is responsible to track time for each activity.
- Participants: Are the stakeholders who participate in the workshop.
11. Are Needs & Requirements The Same, Or They Are Different? Explain The Similarity Or Diff
The need and requirements are explained in the previous two questions. Let us take an example to explain further. An example of a simple need could be: Only authenticated users can enter the system to access the member-only features.
The requirements can be detailed out as follows:
Create a login screen that allows the members to enter login ID and password and click on the submit button to access the members-only area. In case of a wrong login ID and/or password, the system throws an error.
12. Have You Participated In Requirements Elicitation Meetings? What Are The Major Challenges You Faced?
Yes, I have participated in the requirement elicitation phase in my last project. This project was for ‘National Bank’ (Change it as per your customer name). We were doing this project for the retail banking group. Though there were several challenges, I would like to point the top two:
- Even though we had scheduled the requirements elicitation meetings well in advance and had also communicated to the bank, we found that the stakeholders were not available at the scheduled time, and we had to wait for hours sometimes. This was going to have an impact on the overall schedule, so we involved the senior management and urged them for better participation.
- We found this customer to be tech-savvy in general and that was a good thing, but some of the stakeholders were going overboard in explaining their requirements. They were also giving their wish list as well. We tried telling them that this was probably out of scope, but they were not ready to listen. So, we decided to handle these out of scope later, as we didn’t want to interrupt the requirements gathering process.
- I have also come across different versions or contradictory requirements coming in from different stakeholders.
13. What Is A Use Case? Why Are These Used?
A use case is a visual model to represent the high-level requirements of a system. A use case diagram comprises of an actor and uses case (action). A use case is modeled from the user’s perspective.
Following are the main characteristics of a use case:
- Contains both functional and non-functional requirements.
- Defines the actors involved in the scenarios.
- Shows relationships between use cases.
We also create a use case specifications document to represent:
- Describes the flow of events/scenarios.
- Contains main flow, alternative flows, and exceptional flows.
14. What Are Primary And Secondary Actors?
There are mainly two types of actors that can be depicted in a Use case:
- Primary actors – The actor who initiates the use case.
- Secondary actors – The actor who assists the primary actor in completing the use case.
For example, Account opening in a bank. Here the person opening the account is the primary actor and the bank employee is the secondary actor.
15. What Is Process modeling?
Process modeling is the technique to capture, analyze, and model the business processes of an organization.
We can use any of the following techniques for process modeling:
- UML diagrams
- Flow charts
- BPMN diagrams
- Data Flow Diagrams (DFD)
Process models can be created in a hierarchical fashion. A high-level view of all the key processes is created first. These high-level processes are decomposed to create the next level of processes. A banking application can have an account opening process at level one, which can then be decomposed to saving account opening and current account opening processes.
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