The Business Analyst Boot Camp

Intention

The intention of this boot camp is to both introduce participants to good business analysis practices and work with participants to collaboratively design an effective business analysis process which utilizes these practices. Our belief at WSA Consulting is your own people are the best consultants for your organization and given the correct tools and guidance can create the best process for your organization.

Goals

• Discover existing business analysis process and practices to identify “pain points”
• Understand the purpose of business analysis
• Gain familiarity with International Institute of Business Analysis Book of Knowledge (BABOK) knowledge areas
  
  • Enterprise Analysis
  • Requirements Planning and Analysis
  • Requirements Elicitation
  • Requirements Analysis and Documentation
  • Requirements Communication
  • Solution Assessment and Validation

• Learn what requirements are and the characteristics of good requirements (both text book definition, and practical definition)
• Learn useful tools and practices for requirements analysis and documentation including:
  
  • Activity Diagrams
  • Use Cases
  • User Stories
  • Class Diagrams
  • Test Driven Analysis

• Learn good practices for integrating business analysis and agile software development
• Learn how to design software processes using the Eclipse Process Framework (EFP)
• Develop a plan of action for improving the existing business analysis processes

Boot Camp Outline

Day 1 Morning – What is Business Analysis?

Process Analysis Workshop

A facilitated workshop to model and understand the existing business analysis process and identify “pain points”. During this workshop we will establish criteria for success of the boot camp.

Business Analysis as a Profession

• What is business analysis and what is a business analyst?
• Introduction to the IIBA, the BA BOK, and Business analysis areas of knowledge

Requirements Theory

• What is a requirement and what is a good requirement both in theory and in practice?
  
  • IEEE definition of requirements and requirements quality.
  • Understanding who need the requirements and what they are really using the requirements for?
• Requirements Types
  
  • Functional and non functional
  • Business rules
  • Quality requirements

Day 1 Afternoon – Enterprise Modeling

Enterprise Modeling Workshop

The purpose of this workshop is to understand the business context by creating an enterprise model. The enterprise model provides a vocabulary for discussing the business and also guides subsequent analysis for specific software projects. 

During this workshop analysis tools such as activity diagrams and class diagrams shall be introduced. Rapid documentation methods using wikis and digital cameras is also demonstrated.

An Introduction to EPF

A short introduction to the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) an open source tool for creating and sharing software processes. EPF provides descriptions for requirements practices including individual roles, tasks, work products, guidance, checklists and templates. All of these descriptions may be modified and evolved by the practitioner.

Day 2 Morning – What do they really need (versus want)?

Requirements Elicitation

Introduces effective practices for collecting requirements:

• Identifying the stake holders
• Understanding the stake holder – “walk a mile in another man’s shoes”
• Interview techniques
• Brain storming
• Focus Groups
• Document Analysis
• Participant Observation

Discussion: working with reluctant stake holders.

Requirements Interpretation and Understanding

A BA’s job is not simply to be a transcriptionist capturing every wish and dream of the stake holder. Also the stakeholder may not be aware of what is possible, people do not ask for innovation. This section discusses the need of the business analyst to distinguish between the wants and needs of the stake holder and to be an innovator.

Scope

What are the limits of the proposed project, what is in and what is out. This section introduces the context diagram as a tool to help facilitate the scope of the system.

Vision Workshop

The vision rallies the team members behind an idea and give them the context for decision-making in the requirements area. A vision document captures the vision and often serves as a contract for more detailed requirements. During this workshop, participants shall create a vision for their project and capture that vision in a vision document.

Day 2 Afternoon Use Case Analysis

Use Case Workshop Part 1

During this workshop participants shall start to create and document use case briefs for the system under analysis. Participants shall learn what the use case model is about, and how to effectively capture requirements and start the analysis of a system with use cases.

The Software Requirements Specification (SRS)

Participants are introduced to the IEEE standard Software Requirements Specification. Participants shall begin to create an SRS template appropriate for their project and begin writing an SRS for their project.

Day 3 Morning – Use Case Analysis

Use Case Workshop Part 2

During the second part of the use case workshop, participants refine their use case briefs by increasing the precision of the scenario description and dressing up the use cases with extensions/alternatives, and pre and post conditions.

Use Case Quality Guidelines

Participants learn several quality guidelines for use cases. If possible, participants shall have the opportunity to review existing use cases and use the quality guidelines to evaluate the use cases and recommend improvements. 

Managing System Wide Requirements

Use cases are only effective for describing functional requirements, but often most of the requirements iceberg remains submerged in the form of non functional requirements. This section proposes strategies for capturing non functional requirements and managing them.

Use Case Realization

The use case realization is a powerful mechanism for describing how a use case realized over a model. This is an effective mechanism for discovering and linking external interface requirements and data requirements to the use case.

SRS Writing Exercise

Time is provided for participants to utilize the requirements documentation practices to update their software requirements specification.

Day 3 Afternoon – The Agile Business Analyst

The Agile Business Analyst

This section offers participants practical guidance for how the business analyst integrates and collaborates with all members of an agile team and how to improve the business analysis process by leveraging the agile software development process.

Use Cases and User Stories

“A use case is to a user story like a gazebo is to a gazelle”. This section explains the differences between use cases and user stories, and the respective strengths and weaknesses of both.

Effective Agile Business Analysis Practices

This section introduces four guidelines for integrate business analysis into an agile process to create an effective agile business analysis process. During this section we explore ways these four practices may be applied.

Day 4 Morning – BA and QA

Test Driven Analysis

The most truthful and up to date requirement for a system is the acceptance test. This section introduces the theory of test driven analysis and develops practical approaches to integrating both test driven analysis and use case analysis to create a powerful and effective requirements package.

Requirements Traceability

Requirements traceability is the ability to trace one project element to another, such as a requirement to a design element, to a code element and the test that validate and verify the requirement. This section introduces practical approaches for requirements traceability.

Opening the Black Box From Analysis to Design

This section shows how use case realization can be used to begin the design process by “opening up” the black box and describing how major subsystems collaborate to implement the behaviour described by the use case. This becomes the start of the architectural work book.

Day 4 Afternoon – Deploying An Effective Business Analysis Process

Review of BABOK areas of knowledge

This section offers a quick review of the BABOK areas of knowledge and how concepts introduced and developed during this boot camp are related to the BABOK areas of knowledge.

Creating the Effective Requirements Process

This is a review of the process developed during the boot camp and collaboratively refines the process.

Developing an Action Plan

Developing a set of action items to go forward with the business analysis process.