Most large companies and organizations that rely heavily on software in business operations, employ Business Analysts to communicate business needs to software developers. When analysts do not carry out their jobs effectively, the result is incomplete or incorrect requirements -- leading causes of spiraling development costs and project delays.

Learn how to cut costs and delays by improving communication between business stakeholders and developers through comprehensive requirements analysis and documentation and by guaranteeing results through structured testing and quality assurance. We will cover all aspects of the Business Analyst role from requirements gathering to testing. All major techniques both Structured and Object-Oriented (OO) are addressed in this course. You will receive a hard copy of all course material as well as a Job Aids booklet, containing useful templates, examples, guidelines and glossary for use back on the job.

What makes this course stand out from the competition?

• Value for money: No course on the market offers this amount of content in so little time. How can we do this?  By removing all of the fat traditionally found in BA courses.
• Scenario-based training: One integrated case study is used throughout the course to provide a consistent context for learning.
• Experience: Our course is written and delivered by professionals with extensive practical experience in business analysis.

Mapping to the IIBA Body of Knowledge

Boston University is a Charter Endorsed Education Provider of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA). This course supports understanding of the following knowledge areas as defined by the IIBA in the draft of the Body of Knowledge (BOK) released in July of 2006:

• Requirements Planning and Management
• Requirements Elicitation
• Requirements Analysis and Documentation
• Requirements Communication
• Requirements Implementation

Who should attend

• Entry-level IT Business Analysts and their managers
• Self-taught IT Business Analysts requiring a course that fills in the gaps and puts all the pieces together
• Systems Analysts and programmers interested in expanding their role into the business area
• Quality assurance professionals
• IT Project Managers
  

Prerequisites
None

What you will achieve

Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:

• Improve the quality of interviews with users using techniques that guide you through the process, showing you what questions to ask and when.
• Conduct group (JAD) sessions for capturing and verifying requirements, using state-of-the-art interviewing techniques including use cases and Object Oriented Analysis.
• Write a comprehensive and unambiguous Business Requirements Document, communicating the needs of the business to users and to the technical team
• Use UML 2 the current industry OO standard  - in preparing business requirements and diagrams.
• Create requirements documentation that can be used as the basis for customized development, maintenance of existing systems and/or as selection criteria for off-the-shelf software.
• Gather business requirements using traditional Structured Analysis and Object-Oriented Analysis (OOA).
• Describe complex business logic and ensure completeness of testing using Decision Tables.
• Understand basic concepts of iterative development.
• Specify business processes with use cases.
• Assure quality through structured verification and validation techniques and use-case scenario testing.

What you will learn

• Brainstorming
• JAD (Joint Application Design)
• Business data modeling
• Entity Relationship Diagrams
• Use Case diagrams
• Work Flow Analysis
• Activity Diagrams
• Data Flow Diagrams
• Decision Tables
• Structured Testing principles and methods
• Structured Walkthroughs
• Black Box requirements-based testing including boundary value analysis
• Systems testing (Regression, volume, stress, usability, performance tests)
• Mapping Business Analysis tools to project development phases for waterfall and iterative methodologies
• Object-Oriented (OO) tools for the Business Analyst, using UML 2
• Use cases, Class diagrams

Agenda

Day 1:

• The BA Role/ Interview Techniques
• Gathering Requirements with Use Cases
• Gathering Workflow and Complex Requirements
• Documenting Requirements for Legacy Systems using Structured Analysis

Day 2:

• Gathering Business Data Requirements
• Practical Guide to Object-Oriented Analysis for the BA
• The BA Role in Testing
• Project Management for the BA