Whether you are embarking on the new role or experienced role in your Business analyst career, getting yourself ready with the different business analyst interview questions is essential. Because an interview is an art to represent yourself as a suitable candidate with proper justification of your knowledge to a company. Show
Sounds weird? Not at all! In a highly completive market, multiple candidates are eyeing to a single position that you are applying for. And answering business analysts interview questions within a limited timeframe is the only way to prove your expertise and impress your employer.
Hence, give yourself enough time to prepare for business analyst interview questions that you may face. The level and complexity of business analyst interview questions vary depending on the position you are applying for and also on the company-specific job role. So, it is good to concentrate on the specific area like senior business analyst interview questions, agile business analyst interview questions, junior business analyst interview questions, entry level business analyst interview questions along with the generic business analyst interview questions and answers. In this blog, we have brought some of the best business analyst interview questions and answers that you may find useful for your next business analyst interview preparation. Top business analyst interview questions fall under the generic category and could be asked as a part of business analyst interview questions for any career levels. 1. Who is Business Analyst?Answer: A business analyst works as a bridge between different stakeholders in an organization. He connects with the different stakeholders of an organization to clarify and finalize the requirements, helps the project team in project planning, designing and finally validating the developed components. He is the person who possesses adequate domain knowledge and can sort the business needs amongst the stakeholders who belong to different domains. 2. Name some of the documents that a business analyst use to handle?Answer: Following are some of the common documents that a business analyst use to handle:
3. What is SRS and what are its key elements?Answer: A System Requirements Specification (SRS) or a Software Requirements Specification is a document or set of documents that describe the features of a system or software application. It includes a variety of elements which define the intended functionality required by the stakeholders and customer to satisfy the end users. In addition to that, an SRS provides a high-level idea of the system and its behavior, the main supported business processes, the assumptions and the key performance parameters for the system. The key elements of an SRS are:
4. What is a requirement?Answer: A requirement is a targeted solution to achieve specific business goals or objectives. It is an input to various stages of SDLC. This is a basis of a project which must be validated by the
stakeholders and business users before implementation. Besides that, every requirement needs to be properly documented for future reference purpose. 5. What is Use case?Answer: A use case is a diagrammatic representation of a system which describes how a user uses a system to accomplish a goal. It is an integral part of software engineering and software modelling technique which defines the targeted features and the
resolution of any possible errors which a user may encounter.
6. What are the steps that you need to follow to design a use case?Answer: The steps in designing use cases are:
7. What is Scope creep and how can you avoid scope creep?Answer: Scope creep, or requirement creep is a term that relates to the uncontrolled changes or deviation in the project’s scope within the same resource range for example within same schedule and budget of the project. It’s an indication of poor project management and a viable risk to a project. Some of the possible causes of scope creep are:
Scope creep could be avoided by:
8. What is BRD? How is it different from SRS?Answer: A Business Requirements Document (BRD) is a formal contract between the customer and the organization for a product. The difference between BRD and SRS are as follows:
9. What is Gap Analysis?Answer: Gap Analysis is a technique to analyze the gap between the existing system and functionalities, and the targeted system. Here gap means the amount of task or change that may be required to get the intended result. It’s a performance level comparison between the present and the proposed functionalities. 10. What is requirement prioritization? What are the different techniques used for it?Answer: Requirements prioritization is the process to allocate requirements based on the business urgency to different phases, schedule, cost, etc. There are various techniques which are used for requirements prioritization:
Best entry level business analyst interview questions11. What is the requirement elicitation technique?Answer: Requirement elicitation is the process of requirement gathering from stakeholders, users, and
customers by conducting meetings, questionnaires, interviews, brainstorming prototyping, sessions, etc. 12. What is the fundamental difference between a requirement and need in a business analysis perspective?Answer: Needs are high-level definitions of the future goals of a business. Whereas, Requirements are the representation of the detailed description of that business needs. 13. What are non-functional requirements and how do you capture them?Answer: Non-functional requirements represent the performance level characteristics like how fast it can respond, how smooth is a user interface, security, etc. of the application under development (AUD). 14. What are the skills that a business analyst must possess?Answer: We can broadly categorize the skills of a business analyst in three types:
For each of the above categories a business analyst should possess some skills as mentioned below:
15. How will you define a good quality requirement as a business analyst?Answer: We can measure the quality of a requirement using SMART rule. As per this rule, a good quality requirement should be:
16. Which documents are used to capture non-functional requirements?Answer: There are two documents that are used to capture non-functional requirements, and they are:
17. What is alternate flow in use case diagram?Answer: It is an alternative solution or activity in a use case that should be followed in case of any failure in the system. 18. Define Personas?Answer: Personas represents User-Centered Design methodologies. To enable an application capable of performing on a demographic basis, fictional characters are conceptualized by the business analysts and based on their possible demographic specific behavior scenarios are created during design. 19. What is an activity diagram and what are the important elements of it?Answer: An activity diagram is a visual representation of the workflow of a business use case. This diagram shows various activities that take place in an organization in different departments like HR,
Sales, Accounts, etc. The activity diagram highlights the differences in the departments. 20. What is UML modelling?Answer: UML stands for Unified Modelling Language. It is a standard that the industry uses for documenting, constructing and visualizing various components of a system. This modelling standard is primarily used for software development. However, it is also used for describing job roles, organizational functions, and business processes. Some of the important diagrams that BAs use as part of UML are the class diagram, state diagrams and use cases.
Most popular Junior business analyst interview questions21. What are the best practices to follow while writing a use case?Answer: Some of the best practices to write a use case are as follows:
22. What is the difference between exception flow and alternate flow?Answer: Alternate flow are the alternative actions that can be performed apart for the main flow and can be considered as an optional flow. 23. Do you think a business analyst should be involved in testing?Answer: Yes. Because a business analyst understands the overall system requirements and challenges associated with it very well. Hence, he can be instrumental during the testing phase to run it appropriately and resolve any system related query. 24. What does INVEST stand for?Answer: INVEST stands for –
It can assist project managers and technical team to deliver quality products/services. 25. What is Pareto Analysis?Answer: Pareto Analysis which is also known as 80/20 rule is a decision-making technique. It is a useful technique for defect resolution and quality control. As per this analysis rule, 20 % causes create 80 % effects in a system, which is why it is named as 80/20 rule.
26. What is BPMN and what are its basic elements?Answer: BPMN is the Business Process Model and Notation. It is a graphical representation of business processes. There are five basic elements of BPMN, and they are –
27. What is Kano analysis?Answer: Kano Analysis is used to analyze a system regarding its requirements to identify its impact on customers’ satisfaction. 28. What are the different types of actors you know in use case diagram?Answer: There are mainly two types of actors can be depicted in a Use case-
Moreover, we can categorized actors into four types :
29. What are the different types of the gap that a business analyst can encounter during gap analysis?Answer: There are mainly four types of gap –
30. What is Benchmarking?Answer: Benchmarking is about measuring the performance of an organization to compete in the industry. In this process, a company may measure its policies, performance, rules and other measures.
Most popular Senior business analyst interview questions31. How do you decide that as a business analyst you have gathered all the requirements?Answer: We can conclude that all the requirements are gathered only when –
32. How do you perform requirement gathering?Answer: The requirement gathering process is generally divided into multiple steps which are agnostic to the SDLC cycle. Each step involves:
The steps are as follows: Step 1: Gather Background Information – This may include collecting background information about the project, analyzing any potential risk associated with the project. Techniques like PESTLE analysis, Porter’s Five forces framework could be used for this purpose. Step 2: Identify Stakeholders – They are the decision makers of a project and approver for requirements and priorities. Stakeholders may range from project owners to senior managers, end users, and even competitors. Step 3: Discover Business Objectives – This is to understand the business needs of the project before going deep into the project. SWOT analysis, Benchmarking, analyzing business objectives SMART and listing business objectives are some of the techniques used for this purpose. Step 4: Evaluate Options – This is to identify the options to achieve business objectives. Impact analysis, Risk analysis, Cost-benefit analysis are some of the methods which are used for this purpose. Step 5: Scope Definition – A scope is a project development goal which is set based on the business objectives. A scope definition document is used to detail the goals for each phase of a project. Step 6: Business Analyst Delivery Plan – Based on the project scope, stakeholders availability and project methodology a document called business analyst is created at this step. The document provides information on deliverables with their timeline. Step 7: Define Project Requirements – In this step, two types of documents are used – Functional requirement document and Non-functional requirement document. Based on the development methodology to be used in the project the business analyst needs to clarify the requirements with the stakeholders by interviewing them on the requirements and get the sign off on the same. Step 8: Support Implementation through SDLC – This is the technical implementation step of the requirements where a business analyst gets involved with different teams. This includes coordinating with the development team and testing team to ensure requirements are implemented as expected and appropriately tested against all the possible business scenarios. They also need to handle the change request which may arise from the stakeholders at the later point of time. Step 9: Evaluate Value Added By Project – This is the continuous evaluation of the project to evaluate whether the business objectives implementation correctly meets the business needs outcome and timeline. 33. Why it is necessary for a business analyst to get involved during the implementation of requirements?Answer: Gaining domain knowledge and providing an analytical solution are the two major criteria of a business analyst. Hence, during actual implementation of a requirement or use case a business analyst can help to resolve many business strategies related problems that may arise during the implementation stage. On the contrary, they can learn from the problems which may help them to provide the solution in similar scenarios and also help to gain their domain knowledge. 34. What are the problems that a business analyst may face?Answer: From the initiation to post implementation of a project a business analyst may face the following problems –
35. Explain requirement elicitation strategy?Answer: Requirement elicitation is the process to collect all the requirements related to a system from the end users, customers, and stakeholders. As per the BABOK guide, there are nine methods which can be used as part of requirement elicitation process, and these are:
36. What is Business Model Analysis?Answer: Business Model Analysis is a technique to analyze whether a business is viable and valuable regarding social, economic and other perspectives. The business model analysis provides the foundation for any required business model change and innovation for an organization. 37. Do you think the role of a Business Analyst is a need for a project?Answer: Yes, because the role of a Business analyst is extremely beneficial from the kick-off to the implementation of a project. Here are the top 5 reasons:
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