Business analyst in modern software development

Business analyst is one of the latest and highly requested professions in the Information Technology industry. The profession of BA is one of the most sought after not only in the field of IT, but also in every field where businesses usually need to predict possible issues, avoid miscommunications and make sure the product is built using the right software development process (is it a turnkey software development process or outsource of a huge project) and delivered according to agreed requirements. The price of these employees, in particular, confirms that even in the crisis, their salaries rose by $ 320.

On average, BAs start their careers at $ 500-665 per month. In 1-3 years they might calculate a salary of $ 1100-1500. Of course, the numbers may vary in different countries, companies and of course the level of expertise.

In most cases, the vacancy BA (Business Analyst) is often understood as Information Technology business analytics. But there are lots of such experts in other areas. Such BAs can do in the company, other than writing technical documentation and communicating with the customer.

There is a whole range of BAs, especially in the field of creating digital products. Who they are, their difference, and what is common among these types we will discuss in this article. At the end you will find a checklist for pumping soft skills, important for any specialist working with BAs.

Let’s start with basics

A BA is an expert who collects, processes data and draws conclusions from them. Regardless of a project size, domain or approach to software development, a typical workflow of a Business Analyst looks like this:

• meetings and communication,
• the analysis of data,
• systematization or documentation of decisions,
• ideas visualization and presentation.

Every BA should clearly understand the problems related to managing stakeholders, possible development needs and areas of improvements in terms of delivering agreed scope of work. He helps top management to achieve business goals, stay focused and to understand the effectiveness of a solution based on analytics. A typical BA (medium/senior) should be able to turn an idea into a list of specific tasks that will help stakeholders to achieve their goals. And then evaluate the effectiveness using constantly monitored metrics.

Here is the workflow of an IT BA: to understand the current situation, to help form the desired result and make a plan of action from the present to the future.

Depending on the tasks and data types that BA works with, there are several types of them. But they are all united by soft skills. Let’s walk through them.

Types of BAs and do the do in software development process

Based on the tasks or issues that such experts solves, here are seven types of BAs:

• IT BA – collects customer requirements and prepares terms of reference for the software development vendor/team, offers a solution to the customer’s problem;

• Business Process Analyst – studies and improves processes related to business (especially when it comes to very complicated domains like insurance or finance): recruitment, HR, teamwork performance. The vacancy may be called an operations manager or process BA;

• Business consultant – among common tasks of such candidates are all related to researching and visualizing possible ways of business growth;

• System analyst – the main goal of such a position is to collect and deliver business requirements to software developers, they are also actively involved into designing Information Technology systems and architecture at the very early stages of the project or during modernization.

• Investment analyst – assesses the investment attractiveness of businesses;

• Data analyst – obviously they work with a huge amount of data, using lots of scrips, they are also involved in conducting researches and they are responsible for information visualization;

• Product analyst – studies product metrics, explores growth points and offers management solutions.

Where BAs involved in software development

A common position in outsourcing companies. In short, the BA analyzes and solves customer problems. Moreover, BA understands both the technical part and the business part. He translates business needs into technical language and makes sure that the team equally understands the final decision.

Typical BA’s responsibilities:

• communication with clients;
• collection and analysis of customer requirements;
• drafting a solution concept;
• formation of specifications (technical documentation);
• writing terms of reference and prototyping;
• requirements management – documentation, analysis and prioritization of requirements throughout the project;
• communicating requirements to the development team, including programmers, designers and testers.

How to become

To become an IT business analyst, you do not need to have a technical background, but you must have the soft skills listed above. You can get basic technical knowledge and go to the company intern or Junior position, thus gaining practical experience.

What you need to know:

• product development cycle;
• requirements management process, requirements classification;
• business process diagrams, such as BPMN;
• how the project is built, depending on the methodology – Waterfall, Agile;
• how to write technical documentation.