Role of a Business Analyst in SDLC

The SDLC which is Software Development Life Cycle, is the total development life cycle of a system or a software. It involves a series of steps performed in a company to deliver a software project. A Business Analyst is closely related with each of the steps involved in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The series of steps which involves a BA in the SDLC process are as follows:

Naturally, a Business Analyst is not just confined to the above mentioned roles. Given below is a brief description of the activities in which a BA is involved.

Initiation and Planning:

At first when a prospective project is put forth in front of the team, the Project Manager, Business Analyst and the Technical Architect is involved in the Initiation and Planning phase. Key points for discussion are as follows:

• Feasibility of the project?
• Will the project be profitable?
• Technical challenges?
• Project technical risks?
• Impact Analysis

On completion of the above discussion, a SOW (Statement of Work) keeping the client in loop is signed and a project plan is made which gives a detailed view of the milestone of the project, iteration and end date of each phase during the development of the project.

Requirement Analysis:

During the Analysis Phase most of the typical business analysis requirements related activities take place. A Business Analyst is heavily involved in making appointments with the client and start with interviewing them about the requirement of the project. This process is commonly known as Requirement gathering or Requirement Elicitation. This is where the BA will also use their modelling skills to document business requirements and prioritize activities. The information gathered is documented using MS Word or any similar software to represent use cases, use case diagram, activity diagram and data flow diagram etc.

Design and Development:

The requirements have now been designed into a solution which is being implemented. The Business Analyst doesn’t have much to do in this phase. At times, it can happen that the BA is asked to clarify requirements or in certain Agile Scrum projects the business analyst will be asked to review prototypes. Business analyst should frequently have meeting with the team or developer in case of clarification to ensure that the project is on the right track. 

Testing and Implementation:

During the Testing and Implementation phase the Business Analyst can assist with reviewing the test scripts to ensure all functional requirements are being tested. The BA can also make use of a Traceability Matrix to trace the requirements during implementation. After which the project is sent for User Acceptance Testing, in which business analyst makes an appointment with client and the client performs a sanity check. In case of bugs the project is sent back to the development team, else client will accept the project and beta version is implemented.

Conclusion:

Thus this concludes that the role of a BA is not confided to Analysis or Requirements Gathering phase alone but also in the Design and development as well as the testing phase.

About Author:

Disha Udani is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at: disha.udani@spluspl.com