Test Driven Design The adoption of agile development is clearly on the rise and with it comes–at least the consideration for–Test Driven Design (TDD). Although the decision to embrace TDD in your deve...
Expert Advice Whose advice are you listening to when building your requirements? Sure, your end users think they know what they want, but are they the right people to assist you in designing a solutio...
Why End Users Don't Like Their Solution One of the biggest problems facing your job as a business analyst is unhappy end users. Sometimes it feels like you're more of a therapist than a business analy...
My biggest motivator for understanding project management was working with bad project managers. I'm usually not this critical, but if you're stuck on a project with a bad project manager, things are ...
Do you use surveys to conduct analysis for your requirements? My guess is no. But I hope that will change after reading this article. Surveys are a great way to collect data to support your analyses. ...
Too Many Words We've all heard that a picture's worth a thousand words and I would say that's a conservative number. The right picture has the ability to convey tens of thousands of words if it's stru...
Communication Breakdown Communication breakdowns are the worst kinds of problems for business analysts. As a business analysts, your job centers on effective communication. However, how many times is ...
A Wiki Is More Than Just A Dictionary One of the great tools that came out of the agile software development movement of the 1990s was the wiki. There's no need to go into a long explanation of what a...
What's a Business Analyst To Do? What happened to the role of the business analyst on agile software projects? Extreme Programming, a pioneering agile methodology, talks a lot about the interactions ...
Active Listening You have two ears and one mouth for a reason. My advice to most people–regardless of profession–is to listen more than you speak. For a business analyst however, the art of listening ...
Heavy Lifting Most of time, the workload on business analyst is pretty reasonable; however, sometimes a massive amount of requirements must be gathered in a short amount of time. I've helped many comp...
When Push Comes to Shove Gathering requirements seems like a straightforward process, but sometimes it's hard to figure out the relative importance of the requirements. If you're running an agile proj...
