Importance of a Business Analyst in the Software Development Life Cycle

In software engineering, a business analyst is not your ordinary business analyst. Business analysts help businesses enhance their performance through data-driven choices in fields other than software.

As companies strive to improve efficiency and save expenses, business analytics has become an essential part of their operations. Business analysts find improvements to boost efficiency, which in turn strengthen business operations. They often collaborate with colleagues at all levels of the organization to discuss their findings and execute improvements.

Data is used by business analysts to create business insights and advocate improvements in corporations and other organizations. Business analysts detect problems in almost any aspect of a business, including IT processes, organizational structures, and staff development.

What is the Software Development Life Cycle?

SDLC, or Software Development Life Cycle, is a technique for producing software with the greatest quality and lowest cost in the shortest amount of time. SDLC offers a well-structured flow of phases that aids an organization in producing high-quality software that is well-tested and ready for production usage on time. The waterfall model, spiral model, and Agile model are all popular SDLC models.

The SDLC involves Six Phases:

1. Requirement Analysis
2. Planning
3. Software Design
4. Software Development
5. Testing
6. Deployment

What makes a Software Business Analyst unique?

A software business analyst employs technology-focused data analysis to improve your company's business operations and efficiency. They collaborate with both technical and non-technical teams, focusing on how to promote company success.

Simply put, a company Analyst assesses company data to better organizational decision-making. They primarily serve as a link between management or stakeholders (decision-makers) and production (decision-implementers).

What are the roles of Software Business Analyst?

The roles of a business analyst in the software development life cycle does differ a bit from the traditional business analyst. They are a combination of both, but they are closer to the developers and stakeholders. A business analyst is involved in almost every phase of the SDLC from the start to the end and even after the deployment.

Defining the Project Scope

A business analyst should find the project's final vision early on, thus restricting the scope of development. A clearly defined project scope will enable the team to prioritize features to deliver a minimal practical product MVP at the earliest convenience, rather than wasting time on secondary and nice-to-have features.

A well-defined scope also enables the development team to estimate the necessary resources and potential dangers. It requires them to supply rough estimates and manage the project backlog. The project backlog outlines how the project will evolve and what tasks are still unfinished.

Conducting Research

A business analyst researches the project to assess its scope and get all essential prerequisites. They must do extensive competition research to compare the items.

The business analyst also analyzes documents and collaborates with other stakeholders during brainstorming sessions. They might help developers in developing software by comparing it to rivals. Requirement elicitation enables an analyst to obtain a thorough grasp of the project's business demands, hence easing requirements collecting.

Project Requirement Gathering

Gathering and assessing requirements is an essential element of every project, since it lays the groundwork for its success. It is the business analysts' responsibility to ensure that the requirements are clear, documented, and rated in order of significance.

Business analysts get requirements by interviewing stakeholders, watching business processes, evaluating existing documentation, and meetings.

Writing Requirements

A business analyst is also held responsible for creating software documents that help other stakeholders and developers for support in the software. The software documents are created from the information accumulated from the stakeholders, clients, and domain experts.

These documents have the system functionalities, its dependencies, its interactions, stakeholders, and any other information about the system. The documents are prepared so they can be used in the future.

Communication

Effective communication is a vital part of the job. Business analysts improve communication across several teams, ensuring that everyone understands the project's aims and needs.

Project Management

Business analysts may be assigned project management tasks in some situations, helping in the planning, monitoring, and management of project schedules and resources.

Quality Assurance

They may be taking part in testing and assurance to guarantee that the solutions implemented fulfill the established criteria and perform properly.

Change Management

They may be taking part in testing and assurance to guarantee that the solutions implemented fulfill the established criteria and perform properly.

Stakeholder Engagement

They engage with a wide range of stakeholders, including executives, clients, end-users, and IT teams, to ensure alignment and buy-in for proposed solutions.

Continuous Improvement

Business analysts check the performance of implemented solutions and recommend further improvements to enhance the effectiveness of the business.

Where to hire professional Business Analysts?

Hiring business analysts separately could prove to be expensive, and it can take time for them to adjust to the organization’s norms. A solution to this problem could be to hire 99 Technologies’ dedicated teams. 99 Technologies offers a comprehensive software development life cycle with a dedicated team. The team is rehearsed in the software development process where you get a complete product in the end. This team is comprised of Developers, Testers, Domain Experts, and Business Analysts. In this way, you won't have to hire each resource individually.