Most Frequently Asked Business Analyst Interview Questions And Answers to Help You Prepare For The Upcoming Interview:
A Business Analyst is the one who analyzes the business of an organization. The core duty of a Business Analyst is requirements management.
Business Analyst should be able to understand the business policies, business operations, structure of the organization and suggests any improvements (like how to improve the quality of services, technical solutions to business problems, etc) to achieve the goals of an organization.
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Business Analysts should list the learning from the project, hurdles that have been faced in previous projects and documents the same for future references. Also, documents and business processes, systems, etc. They even validate the business requirements through a process named Walkthrough.
A Business Analyst acts as a link between the organization’s Information Technology and business activities. Their skills should help the organization in achieving its profits by managing the new changes emerging in the industry and adapting them.
They should have good customer service skills, leadership skills, and a calculated or planned thinking approach. Mainly a BA acts as a communication medium between project stakeholders and the project team. They play a vital role in helping the development team in understanding the requirements and vice versa.
BA Job Interview Process:
For the Business Analyst job interview, there may be three different rounds. The first round will be telephonic. In the second and third rounds, there may be a group of interviewers like HR, stakeholders of a technical team, higher management authorities, etc.
How to prepare for a BA interview?
For Business Analyst interviews, one should be thorough about their previous experience in the projects. You should have an answer prepared for questions like “How your qualification is related to your job position?” Generally, in this type of interview, situational and behavioral questions are asked.
You should be confident enough to answer the questions of the interviewer. From the answers given by you, the interviewer can judge your listening skills and can assess your capability of responding to the situations.
Frequently Asked Business Analyst Interview Questions
Here we go..!!
Q #1) As a Business Analyst what is your role in an organization?
Answer: Business Analyst plays a vital role in a project for an organization.
- The main role of a Business Analyst is to find out the need of an organization, finding out their problems, even predicting future issues to an extent, suggesting suitable solutions for the same and drive through the organization’s achievements.
- The role varies from organization to organization, project to project and even from domain to domain.
- BA in a project can play the role of a Business Planner, System Analyst, Data Analyst, Organization Analyst, Application Designer, Subject Area Expert, Technical Architect, etc.
- Core skills include a good grip on system engineering concepts, leadership qualities, technical knowledge, writing, and verbal communications.
- Their job may vary as per the employer’s requirement like some are limited to IT projects, even few of them extend their responsibilities to areas such as finance, marketing, accounting, etc.
Q #2) How will you be able to handle the changes to requirements?
Answer: This is a logical question asked in an interview. As a Business Analyst, the first task will be to get a signature on a document by the user which states that after a point of time no changes to the requirements are accepted.
In a few cases, if the changes to the requirements are accepted then:
- Firstly, I will note down the changes made to the requirements and will prioritize them.
- I will also go through those changes and find out the impact of them on the project.
- I will calculate the cost, timeline, and resources required to cover the impact of change requirements on the project.
- And will make sure that whether those changes affect or create gaps to functional design documents, testing or coding.
Q #3) Can you name the tools that are helpful for business analysis?
Answer: The process performed by a Business Analyst is termed as Business Analysis. The tools used include Rational tools, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, MS Project, ERP systems.
Q #4) What is meant by Benchmarking?
Answer: The process of measuring the quality of policies, programs, products, rules and other measures of an organization against the standard measures or the other companies is termed as Benchmarking. This is used to measure the performance of a company to compete in the industry.
The main purpose of benchmarking is to find out the areas of improvement in a company and to analyze how the neighbor companies are achieving their goals.
Q #5) How can you say that a requirement is good or perfect?
Answer: The features and standards of a good requirement can be pointed out using a rule called SMART rule.
Specific: The description of a requirement should be perfect and specific enough to understand it.
Measurable: There are various parameters through which the requirement’s success can be measured.
Attainable: Resources should be able to achieve success with the requirement.
Relevant: States that what results are realistically achieved.
Timely: Requirements for a project should be revealed in time.
Q #6) What makes you unique from others?
Answer: The answer to this question will test your experience, skills, and individuality. You can answer like, “I am technically sound and can make a strong relationship with the customer. With this unique combination, I can use my knowledge and information to build a user-friendly environment”.
Q #7) What are the tasks that are not part of a Business Analyst’s job?
Answer: Business Analyst is not part of the enlisted tasks:
- Should not intend to organize the project team meetings.
- Should not bother regarding the risks and issues tracker of a project.
- Should not perform activities like testing (executing the TC’s), coding or programming.
Q #8) Differentiate between a Risk and an Issue?
Answer: ‘Risk’ is nothing but a problem or something that can be predicted earlier so that some improvement plans are used to handle them. Whereas, an ‘Issue’ means the risk that had happened or occurred.
The role of a BA is not to solve the issue instead should suggest some plans to control the loss/damage caused. And this should be marked as a precautionary measure for other projects.
Example: On some roads, few caution boards are stating that “Road under repair, take diversion”. This is called Risk.
If we travel through the same route which is under construction, then this may cause some damage to the vehicle. This is called an issue.
Q #9) List out the documents that are used by a BA in a Project?
Answer: As a Business Analyst we deal with various documents like Functional Specification document, Technical Specification document, Business Requirement document, Use Case diagram, Requirement Traceability Matrix, etc.
Q #10) What is a misuse case?
Answer: Misuse case is defined as an activity performed by a user which in turn causes system failure. It may be malicious activity. As it is misguiding the system function flow, it is termed as misuse case.
Q #11) How can you handle and manage the difficult stakeholders?
Answer: Dealing with difficult stakeholders is a major task for a BA. There are many ways to handle such situations.
Important points to be noted among them are listed below:
- Identify that difficult stakeholder among the group of stakeholders, listen and concentrate on their point of view with patience. Be polite to them and do not close off the conversation immediately with such people.
- Generally, a stakeholder will be difficult because they are not comfortable with a few things in the project. So listen to them and diplomatically answer such difficult stakeholders.
- Find out a way to meet them personally and have a one on one discussion. By this, you can show your commitment to them.
- Try to find out and resolve their motivations like are they worried about the budget of the project or Curious about the project whether it is turning exactly as per their vision etc.
- Continuously engage such difficult stakeholders and make them understand that their contribution is much value for the project.
Q #12) When can a BA say that the requirements are done?
Answer: Requirements are considered as complete when they satisfy the below criteria:
- Requirements should be aligned with the objectives of a business. It means that the views of business stakeholders should align with the needs to be built for the project.
- All the possible views and ideas of key stakeholders are to be extracted.
- The quality of the requirements should meet/satisfy the organization’s set of criteria through which the quality of the requirements is tested.
- One can say that the requirements are complete when they could be done within the possible available resources.
- All the stakeholders of the project should be in consent with the gathered requirements.
Q #13) What are the various diagrams that a BA should know about?
Answer: There are various types of diagrams that BA’s use in their work.
Few important diagrams among them are,
a) Activity Diagram: This represents the flow from one activity to the other activity. Activity refers to the operation of the system.
Example of the activity diagram:
b) Data Flow Diagram – Graphical representation of the flow of data into and out of the system. This diagram represents how data is shared between organizations.
Example of the Data Flow Diagram:
c) Use case Diagram: This diagram describes the set of actions that systems perform with one or more actors (users) of the systems. Use Case diagram is also called as a Behavioral diagram.
Example of the Use case Diagram:
d) Class Diagram: This is the structural diagram that represents the structure of the system by showing its classes, objects, methods or operations, attributes, etc. A class diagram is the main building block for detailed modeling which is used for programming.
Example of the Class Diagram:
e) Entity Relationship Diagram – ER Diagram is the graphical representation of entities and the relationships between them. This is a data modeling technique.
Example of the Entity-Relationship Diagram:
f) Sequence Diagram: Sequence diagram describes the interaction between the objects like how they operate and in what time sequence the messages flow from one object to the other.
Example of the Sequence Diagram:
g) Collaboration Diagram – Collaboration diagram represents the communication that occurs between the objects by showing the messages flow among them.
Example of the Collaboration Diagram:
Q #14) Brief the difference between the Fish model and V model?
Answer: The fish model consumes more time in dealing with requirements when compared to the V model. Even the Fish model is a bit expensive than the V model. Generally, a Fish model is preferred when there are no uncertainties in the requirements.
Q #15) Which model is better than the Waterfall model and Spiral Model?
Answer: Selecting the life cycle model for a project is based on its type, scope, and limitations. It is solely dependent on the culture of the organization, its terms, and conditions, policies, a process of developing the system, etc.
Q #16) Differentiate an alternate flow and exception flow of a use case diagram?
Answer: Basic flow represents the activities carrying out in order as required by the business. Alternate flow represents actions that are performed apart from the basic flow and also be considered as an optional flow. Whereas Exception flow is executed in a case or any errors.
Example: When we open a login page of any website, there is a link “forgot password” to retrieve the password. This is called an alternate flow.
In the same login page if we enter the correct username and password, sometimes we get an error message stating “404 error”. This is called the exception flow.
Q #17) What does INVEST mean?
Answer: INVEST means Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Sized Appropriately, Testable. With this INVEST process, the project managers and technical teams can deliver the good quality of the product and can provide quality service.
Q #18) What all steps are included in developing a product from a basic idea?
Answer: In the process of developing a product from an idea, there are many steps to be followed as enlisted below,
- Market Analysis: This is a business plan through which the characteristics of a market have been studied, like how the market changes and behaves dynamically.
- SWOT Analysis: This is a process through which the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of an organization are identified.
- Personas: These are typical users of websites or intranet who represents the goals and characteristics of various large groups of users. Personas replicate the real users in functional design.
- Competitor Analysis: Evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of outside competitors.
- Strategic Vision and Feature set: The process of developing the goals in present and planning to achieve the same in the future by moving towards the vision.
- Prioritize Features: All the features of the product that is to be developed are prioritized by the product management to help the development team.
Apart from the above-mentioned steps, there are furthermore terms involved in the process of developing a product. They are Use case, SDLC, Storyboards, Test Cases, Monitoring, and Scalability.
Q #19) Define Pareto Analysis?
Answer: Pareto Analysis is a proper technique used in decision-making for quality control activities and also used in tracing out the resolutions for defects. It is categorized as a decision-making technique based on its statistics that, with a limited number of selected inputs we can have a great impact on the outcome.
It is also termed as 80/20 rule because as per this analysis 80% of the benefits of a project are achieved from 20% of the work.
Q #20) Can you brief Kano Analysis?
Answer: Kano analysis is a powerful technique used in classifying the various types of customer requirements for new products. This Kano Analysis deals with the needs of the end-users of the product.
The main attributes of this Kano Analysis are
- Threshold Attributes: These are the properties that a customer wants to be available in the product.
- Performance Attributes: These represent some extra properties that are not necessary for a product but can be added for customer’s enjoyment.
- Excitement Attributes: These are the properties that the customers are not aware of but are excited when they found such properties in their product.
Conclusion
Every organization hiring a Business Analyst wants to make sure that the hired professional should start contributing his valuable thoughts and ideas from the first day. The output of a BA’s work is utilized by IT people for developing the product and by the non-IT people to see the model of their application product.
In a few interviews, you can get a chance to ask questions to the interviewer. Here are few among them:
- What are the different roles in your organization those who interact with Business Analyst?
- What kind of challenges should I handle in your organization?
- What makes a BA successful in your company?
- What is the process followed in your organization, a huge process or an informal process?
Good Luck and Happy Testing!!!
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