Understanding business needs and defining the right solution

In Business analysis requirement analysis is one of the important activities because it is process of understanding the requirement, Validating, documenting, and prioritizing what business or its user need from a system or solution. The main objective of requirement analysis is to ensure that the proposed solution solves the actual business problem and stakeholder expectation are met. During requirement analysis the business analyst acts as a bridge between technical team and the stakeholder. Mostly stakeholder will explain business needs and business problems in business term but the developer or tester need clear and structure requirement so the Business Analyst analyze the information and convert it into requirement that can be implemented by project team. First step in requirement analysis is to understand the business problem and before defining the solution Business Analyst need to understand why the organization need a change. The next step is to identify the stakeholder, Stakeholder may be group or people, who are affected by the actual system or have an interest in current project. After identifying the stakeholder, then the Business Analyst will perform elicitation technique because different elicitation technique can be used depending on the situation. Understanding their roles and expectations helps the Business Analyst collect complete requirements. Some of the common technique is Interview, Workshop, Brainstorming, Observation, Questionnaires, Document analysis, Focus group, and joint application development. All these technique purpose is to gather the requirement or information directly from stakeholder who understand the business process. Once requirement are collected, the Business Analyst perform requirement analysis. The Business Analyst will examine the requirement to identify the duplicate, missing information, dependencies. Requirement may be categorized as functional and non-functional requirement. Functional requirement describe what system should do and non - functional requirement describe qualities such as performance, Security, Usability, and availability. Then the Business Analyst convert business needs into clear and understandable requirement. In Agile, requirement will be used as User stories & Epic and Business analyst define acceptance criteria. Acceptance criteria describe the condition that must be satisfied for requirement to be accepted. Prioritization is most important part in requirement analysis. Stakeholder and product owner can prioritize requirement based on business value, Risk, Dependence, complexity and customer impact. Techniques such as MoSCoW prioritization can be used to categorize requirements as Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, or Won't Have. Business also involves validation and verification in requirement analysis so that BA check whether requirement are complete, Clear, feasible and aligned with business objective. Traceability is one of the important part because Requirement Traceability Matrix (RTM) can be used to connect requirement with designed element, development activities, and test case. RTM helps to ensure that important requirement are not missed during development and testing. So in Agile project, requirement analysis is not one time activity. Requirement are continuously refined through the project. During backlog refinement, the business analyst, Product owner, Developer, Tester, and other stakeholder discuss user stories, Clarify the requirement, identify the dependencies, identify the complexity also ensure that stories are sufficient enough for further sprint. In simple term, Requirement analysis will ensure that the project team build the right solution for right business problem or needs. Effective requirement analysis is key for successful software development.