Advance Your Business Analysis Career
From the category archives:
There’s a lot of information on the Interweb about how to write a functional specification (FS for short, aka software requirements specification, system specification, product specification), including a fair few articles here on Bridging the Gap. Adriana Beal’s article earlier this year explains why writing a Software Requirements Specification is a valuable analyst skill, and Doug [...]
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Both here at Bridging the Gap and other BA forums, a question that is constantly asked, mainly by aspiring and new BAs is, “Do you have a template to share?” My temptation, when I get one of these questions, is to send the person to Let Me Google That For You. (Because, really, how difficult can [...]
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So here’s a topic that you don’t see discussed very often. Document version numbers might seem like a trivial concept – a subject upon which there is little to be said – but they are a real bug bear for me. Let me explain why. The Problem Most people tend to use the following version [...]
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In my previous post I described my experience as a business analyst on an agile project. One of the key artifacts I produced on the project was the functional specification (FS). In this post I’m going to get right under the covers of the FS and explain exactly what it was and how it worked. My intention [...]
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A participant of the course, Crafting Better Requirements, that I’m teaching at the My Business Analysis Career platform asks: We run into situations where the business users want provide the design of the solution besides the business requirements. The technical team is against it — they would prefer to be responsible for the design phase. [...]
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Adriana Beal is offering Crafting Better Requirements to help junior, intermediate, and senior BAs kick their requirements specifications up a notch. After completing this course, you’ll be able to: Document better requirements—with more clarity and precision, and less ambiguity. Identify what details are missing from your requirements and must be specified to make them more complete. [...]
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If you are a BA working on the IT space, you may be responsible for creating multiple deliverables, many of them intermediate documents such as meeting minutes and as-is/to be business models. You may also be in charge of producing important and high-visibility requirements specifications such as a Vision document describing the application in general [...]
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Many books and articles describe the characteristics of good requirements and offer templates for requirements documents, but as we all know, applying such knowledge in real-life projects requires more than looking at concepts and examples in a book. In a blog post for TechRepublic,”10 things you should know about hiring a business or systems analyst” [...]
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Politics is a tricky business. When I think of a politician I am reminded of a cowboy trying to herd cattle – they know where they want to take everyone, it’s just rather hard to get everyone to go in their chosen direction. Blood, sweat and tears are involved in the dusty world of influencing [...]
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