Interactive Prototyping – A Catalyst for BA Role

In today’s era, there is necessity that the customer or other stakeholders involved in project should get the real feel of Software or any product before it undergoes into development cycle. To ensure this, there are interactive, high-fidelity prototypes which serves as a powerful medium for Business Analysts to test assets and interactions – the things that make a software look and feel real – before bringing it to the development team.

It is observed that IT Business Analysts are still using low-fidelity wireframes, a straight forward approach to present ideas while the potential of interactive prototypes is often underrated.

However, interactive prototypes can be a credit to BAs looking to communicate a complex requirement to teams and stakeholders, as they offer a visual approach to requirements definition and management and aligning everyone involved in the software’s creation.

Twist in Visual Requirement Gathering Approach:

Business Analyst’s role lies in eliciting, confirming and prioritizing business requirements prior to project kickoff. Defining requirements correctly is crucial in the software development life cycle, to set realistic expectations with clients and encourage sign-off. Without visual resources in the requirements definition process, business objectives and goals are often misunderstood, resulting in delivery delays, stakeholder dissatisfaction and wasted resources.

Interactive prototyping allows BAs to iterate through potential requirements quickly and dynamically. In fact, as BAs dive deeper into requirements definition, interactive prototypes become more and more tangible. They can use them to produce a list of requirements and organize them – filter, customize, add and delete – as the project evolves. This will help to reduce the number of missed requirements.

Involve Stakeholders on Real-Time Requirements Validation:

Stakeholder validation of business requirements should happen early on and often in the software development life cycle. Luckily, interactive prototyping helps to make requirements validation more visual and engaging for stakeholders.

By capturing requirements visually with an interactive prototype, BAs can demonstrate to clients what is due to happen in each screen and UI element directly within the prototype and reduce the need for hefty spec docs that don’t always show the big picture. They can produce the end-to-end flows of business rules and conditions necessary for the stakeholders to understand how the user journey will pan out – the more intuitive and interactive the better.

Stakeholders can then validate business requirements in real-time from a user-centric perspective with functional prototypes. With a series of click-through prototypes, stakeholders can walk through the requirements step-by-step contextually, taking in the entire user story.

Translate Business Requirements for Technical Team:

To ensure that the technical team understands the business requirements is another job for the BA. Quantifying the needs laid out by stakeholders into technical requirements requires focus, understanding and visual aids by interactive prototyping.

The development team needs to know exactly how the business team has envisioned the look and feel of the software. Once the BA and stakeholders have defined the project scope and uncovered the business requirements with their prototype. Technical team can later use it for understanding the business requirement in more appropriate manner.

Gather early feedback from end users with User Experience:

BAs know that successful software is ultimately liable on the user being able to engage with it – without engagement, revenue and branding will suffer. The key to creating engaging software is to test and validate the proposed ideas. Testing outcomes with the users who will eventually interact with the software is a major project success factor. However, it’s a task often neglected by BAs. 

Prototyping affords a rare opportunity to test potential solutions with real users, elicit discussion and draw on real feedback – essentially confirming the conceptual maturity of the proposed solution before additional efforts and resources are applied. UX cognitive and usability testing can be performed on interactive prototypes because they so closely mirror the working application.

In this way, BA being the project middleman will be successful in bridging the gap between vague client ideas and specific business objectives by Interactive Prototyping.

About Author:

Himanshu Suryawanshi is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: himanshu.suryawanshi@spluspl.com