Three Mistakes a Business Analyst Should Avoid
by Ivy Hooks
We've all heard the expression, "What we have here is a failure to communicate." Failure to communicate is the bane of the Business Analyst (BA). The BA has the responsibility to elicit requirements from the business and to communicate them to the development team in a way that makes it clear exactly what is needed and what must be verified. By avoiding the three mistakes Ivy Hooks presents in this paper, a BA can establish good communication early in the requirement process and ultimately improve project success rates.
Ivy Hooks is an internationally recognized expert on the subjects of requirements engineering and requirement management who has published numerous papers, trained and spoken to diverse audiences worldwide. She is also the CEO and a founder of Compliance Automation, Inc., which offers requirements training and other services to help companies, government organizations, and individuals produce defect-free requirements in the most efficient and effective manner possible.
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Where are the other 2 things?
I agree that communication throughout the process is critical, but I disagree that it is the only thing that will support defect free requirements.
It must be part of the validation and change management process that occurs early on. The fundamental fact is that we rely on testers to validate requirements because we don't know how to validate requirements up front.
In aviation software they have multiple levels of software failure tolerances. At the "A" level, there can be no room for error. So how do they accomplish this? By validating the hell out of the requirements!