Business Analyst Interview Questions And Answers

1. What is Business Intelligence?
Answer: The term ‘Business Intelligence’ (BI) provided the user with data and tools to answer any decision making an important question of an organization, it can be related to run the business or part of a business. In short, business intelligence is used for reporting the specified data of any business which is very important and using which higher management of any organization will decide for the growth of their business. Normally below decisions can be decided by any organization from

Business Intelligence tool:

  • BI is used to determine whether a business is running as per plan.
  • BI is used to identify which things are going wrong.
  • BI is used to take and monitor corrective actions.
  • BI is used to identify the current trends of their business.

2. How do you perform risk management in your project?
Answer: A risk is defined as an uncertain event that causes a threat to the existing business which can cause an impact on revenue or sometimes on the profits of the business. Risk management techniques such as risk avoidance, reduction, transfer, and acceptance can be used. We have to identify, analyze, evaluate and control the risk in the business.

3. What is RAD Methodology?
Answer: Rapid Application Development model (RAD) is a kind of incremental model. The phases of the project are produced in parallel to an individual project. The developments in the project are time-boxed, delivered and afterward assembled into a working model.

4. What do you think is the scope of business analysts in the agile methodology perspective?
Answer: With Agile, Business analysts act as a bridge between the development team and stakeholders. They act on key deliverables to prioritize and deliver the project in stipulated time and budget.

5. How do you define a requirement?
Answer: A requirement is a capability possessed by a solution to solve a problem or achieve an objective. Requirements are input to various stages of SDLC and must be properly documented and validated by the business users/stakeholders. 

6. When do you know that you have gathered all the requirements?
Answer: Once the requirements are gathered, they are validated by the business users/client. It is only after the approval of the business users, the requirements are considered to be completed. Additionally, it should be validated:

  • They are elicited from all the stakeholders from all the key stakeholders of the project.
  • They align with the project’s business case.
  • When they could be done with the resources available i.e. attainable.
  • When the stakeholders of the project agree with the elicited requirements.
  • All the requirements which pass the above four criteria are considered to be formal and final. These requirements are then documented and become a part of the project scope.

7. How do you avoid scope creep?
Answer:

  • Scope creep is a hindrance to the project’s success and could be avoided by:
  • Documenting the scope of the project.
  • Following proper change management.
  • Informing the effects of the change to the affected parties before making a change.
  • Documenting the new requirements in the project log.
  • Refrain from adding additional features to the existing functionalities (also called Gold Plating (SVR Training Online)

8. What Are The Quality Procedures Followed Normally By A Business Analyst?
Answer:
 For quality, there is no specific mark, of course, Six Sigma and ITIL (Information technology infrastructural library United kingdom) are certain quality standard establishing organizations and methods. But As a normal, the following should be followed:

The quality of communication while gathering requirements should be excellent and outstanding. Sometimes users are just looking for functionality in the system and they are not even able to say that what exactly will be their dream functionality which will be most convenient to them. In that case, BA should explore them and figure out the exactly demanded requirements. 

9. How Is Business Plan Evaluated?
Answer: 
A business plan is evaluated by checking the contents of the plan such as if the plan was based on the resource planning and envisioning phase of the project.

10. What Are The Problems Business Analyst Could Face During Gathering Business Requirements?
Answer:
 The availability of the people (e.g. managers, supervisors and the end-users) the BA wants to talk with for gathering business requirements. These people have regular daily works to do and their time to spend in the gathering sometimes hard to schedule and for this reason, gathering business requirements is a delay.

11. Version Control And Configuration Management Are Terms Used Widely In The Business Industry, Write Short Notes About The Terms?
Answer: 
By definition, version control is essentially a subset of configuration management. It is usually concerned with the handling changes arising in previous documents as opposed to configuration management which essentially handles the individual components.

12. Briefly Explain The Use Case Model?
Answer: 
This is a model used by software engineers to describe the business environment of a given project. It encompasses a series of workflows that are pertained to a particular actor.

13. What Are Different Diagrams To Be Known By A Ba?
Answer: 
Entity relationship diagram, data flow diagram, use case diagram, class diagram, activity diagram, state chart diagram, sequence diagram, collaboration diagram, component diagrams, deployment diagrams etc..

Use case diagram: explains the business environment. Series of all related actions performed by the actor.

Activity diagram: Used in the early stage of analysis and designing level. It describes each component.

Sequence diagram: It tells the interactions of the objects with each other’s arranged in time sequence.

14. What Are The Qualities You Have That Makes You Suitable For The Position Of Business Analyst?
Answer: 
As a Business Analyst, one always has top-notch communication skills. A perfect mix of technical knowledge and business market knowledge is highly essential. I consider myself a very quick learner and with a good ability to communicate with the development teams and the customers, I think I can certainly make a good difference to the organization on the whole. The ability to deal with conformance tests and identify the prominent parts of the use cases and track them through time will make me more than efficient in the overall work that is involved. 

15. How Does A Business Analyst Play An Important Role In The Initial Stages Of The Project?
Answer: 
To do it right the first time has always been the motto for projects that are running under a tight schedule. To find out the right requirement thus is important. Translating the requirements from the client to the developers is essential for the project to kick off on the right note. If this stage goes off-track, then you can be jeopardizing the future of the entire project.

16. What are the key features of GAP Analysis?
Answer: GAP Analysis is used to address differences that are noticed in the performances between business information system and actual performances in terms of metrics. A Gap Analysis identifies the problems and is directed towards a plan to rectify the issues. 

17. Define Agile Manifesto?
Answer: Agile manifesto is the ultimate guideline for developing better software. It has four key elements such that individuals and interactions should get priority over the process and tools, working software should be given due importance over detailed documentation. It also emphasizes the need for required change rather than following a plan.

18. What is understood by Application Usability?
Answer: If the interaction between a user and a system is seamless, it is said to have good application usability. It is the total of the navigation experience of a user.

19. When do you use the Pair-choice technique?
Answer: This is a prioritization technique. Its main aim is to identify the most important items in a process. It is usually determined by the key stakeholders. A comparative analysis helps to analyze different metrics to assign significance.

20. Can you explain the difference between a risk and an issue?
Answer: The risk is the potential threat while the issue is the real danger that has already taken place and is a setback. For instance, when a strike is called by workers during the last days to finish a product, it will be considered an issue. If there is just a warning for the strike, then it would be considered a threat. 

21. What is an activity diagram and why is it significant?
Answer: 
An activity diagram is a simple and intuitive type of flow chart that enables analysts to present a robust and easy visual of the workflow of a business use case. The objective of the activity diagram is to show various activities taking place in an organization in different departments. Different departments in any organization like HR, Accounts, Sales, etc. have access to the screens that relate to their fields but activity diagrams highlight the differences in the departments which help the developers when they code and design. The important elements in the Activity diagram are initial nodes, control flows, activities, decisions, guard conditions, a fork and join and end nodes.

22. What is PEST analysis and what is its importance?
Answer: 
PEST stands for Political, Economic, Social and Technological. PEST analysis is used to assess the above four external factors concerning your business situation. It is beneficial for your business as they help in understanding how these 4 factors will affect your business in the long term. A detailed understanding of PEST analysis can be obtained from our blog.

23. What is the importance of a flow chart?
Answer: 
A flow chart is a tool that provides a graphical representation of a process. This chart will make a system easy to understand for everyone that is involved with the project that is underway. If you have a massive and complex project with many entities, data, data sources, data destinations and processes involved, a data flow chart is one of the most effective ways of making sense of all that data. The flowchart mostly concerns itself with the flow of data through the system. It is popularly used in Structured Systems Analysis and Design.

24. What is project management? Can you explain?
Answer: Project management is the process of planning, organizing, motivating and controlling resources, procedures, and protocols to achieve a specific goal. It is used to coordinate scientific and daily problems. The primary challenge to project management is to meet all the project goals. These are time, quality, scope, budget, etc.

25. What is Pugh Matrix?
Answer: This technique is a standard part of the Six Sigma technique. It is also known as a problem or design matrix.

26. Define Application Usability?
Answer: This is more than a definition. You want the candidate to provide an overview of application usability, how it can be measured, and why it matters. Yes, this is a term question, but it should also provide a window into the candidate’s thought process. 

27. Tell me about a time when you failed to meet a deadline?
Answer: This is one of the more difficult business analyst interview questions to answer. No one likes to talk about their failures. The good news is that the interviewer knows you’re not perfect—no one is. Use the STAR method to highlight what you learned from your failure.

“In my final year of college, I had two papers due the same week. I accidentally confused the due dates, and one paper ended up being submitted early, and the other late. It was an easy mistake to make, but I should have been more on top of my deadline. I was otherwise a great student, so I spoke to my instructor about the missed deadline, and he was kind enough to only deduct 10% from my grade instead of 20%. From that point forward, I made a point to note all deadlines in my calendar, and I still do that with projects to this day.”

Note that a good answer to this question has a few essential elements: tell a story, acknowledge your responsibility, don’t blame others, and don’t select too large a failure.

28. Tell me about an interesting project you worked on from beginning to end?
Answer: 
The goal of this question is to understand if the candidate was given responsibility in their previous job and led projects. Knowing if the analyst worked on complex, company-level projects says a lot about them. The question tests the strength of the analyst and their ability to communicate details to someone who wasn’t involved in the project, this on its’ own is an important skill to test for.

How to answer this question: If you get asked this question in an interview the best way to approach it is to take 20 seconds to think about it. Once you’ve got a good example then start by explaining the need/problem/ issue that you were tasked with solving. Explain why this was a priority to the company and which manager requested the project.

The next thing you should do is walk the interviewer through your process. Stick to the high-level but include details like who was involved, how long it took you to finish it and how it impacted the company.

You might have a good example that was never used. Go ahead and use that example if it makes you shine.

29. 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.

30. 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. 

31. What is meant by Scope creep?
Answer: Scope creep is defined as uncontrolled or sudden changes or deviations in the project’s scope without changes in other resources of the project. It is due to failure in proper monitoring or miscommunication, etc. 

32. What are the best practices you follow while writing a use case?
Answer:

The following are the best practices that are followed to write a clear and well-documented use case:

  • Capture both functional and non-functional requirements in a use case.
  • Include use case diagrams along with the use case.
  • Include the UI details/notes in the use case.

33. What Is UML?
Answer: The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standard language for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of software systems, as well as for business modeling and other non-software systems. The UML represents a collection of best engineering practices that have proven successful in the modeling of large and complex systems.

34. Where Would You Document Functional And Non Functional Requirements (i.e. Deliverable)?
Answer: 
Functional Requirements are documented in the SRS document / Use Case Document. Non Functional requirements are listed in the SRS document. 

35. We Are Going To A Client On Monday To Help Them With Their Requirements. We Have Just Received A Business Case From The Client, And They Have No Tools In Place. What Would We Do The First Week?
Answer: 
The first week, in this case, is always advisable to do the due diligence of the amount of work, expectations, existing process, timelines with the constraints surrounding. One of the major constraints, in this case, would include a lack of tools.

Depending on the project timelines, complexity and volume of the project present your recommendations for tools to be used and the estimated budget allocation required. Document the comparison of productivity and flexibility with and without tools used. This should help the project sponsors to take a call on going for tools.

36. Describe The Abbreviation Road As Used In Object-Oriented Programming?
Answer:
 The term OOAD is an abbreviation of the phrase Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. Contrary to traditional programming, also called procedural programming whereby the entire code of a given program is written line by line, from scratch. There is a new more powerful approach to software development or simply programming referred to as the Object Technology where predefined objects about particular situations are pre-designed by experienced software engineers and then the programmers just call them into their code to implement a given function in their code.

37. Give The Importance Of Using A Flowchart?
Answer:
 It is easier to interpret as it is graphical and thus all persons involved in the project development can understand it with ease.

38. Describe The Meaning Of The Term Data Mapping?
Answer:
 By definition, the term data mapping is the process by which a system developer creates data element mappings that relate two models of data (databases) to assist in data integration.

This usually assists in the following manner:

  • Data mediation or transformation between the source and the destination of data.
  • Assisting in data lineage analysis by identifying the data relationships.
  • Assists in data masking by discovering sensitive data.
  • Assists in data de-identification process.
  • Assists in consolidating multiple databases into one thus identification of redundant columns and advising the developers for consideration or even elimination.

39. How Many Types Of Diagrams Do You Know And What Do You Know About Them?
Answer: 
Am aware of two types of diagrams namely the use case diagram and the collaboration diagram, the use case diagram has been discussed above and as a result I will only talk about the collaboration diagram here, these are diagrams put into being by modeling the objects of a given systems and then representing the prevalent associations between the objects in questions with the use of links.

40. What Do You Think Is An Important Characteristic That A Business Analyst Should Have To Tide Over Tough Times Of Project?
Answer: 
The first and foremost character that a Business Analyst has to show his confidence. Without that aspect, the interactions with customers and clients can never be positive. Especially during the rough times of the project when there are development-related issues that are being handled, the customer has to be given the right positive picture from the business/development perspective. This has to be done and handled by the Business Analyst. Not just self-confidence but the confidence that he places on the other teammates come into prominence.

41. What Are The Things That Have To Be Considered While Writing A Business Document?
Answer:
 Never should we bring out the small glitches on the top. We have to see through the eyes of the business persons and should always try to instill confidence in them, as much as we have on ourselves. As what they expect is the outer level of details, we should bring out the expectation, assumptions, and other such criteria into the picture.

42. What Is A Flowchart And Why It Is Important?
Answer:
 The flowchart shows the complete flow of the system through symbols and diagrams. It is important because it makes the system easy to understand for developers and all concerned people.

43. If the requirements are changing rapidly in the world, then how will you be able to organize yourself and also be competitive with other business analysts?
Answer:

  • The world would be moving fast and would be rapid. Your employer is not going to wait with you for an answer.
  • If you are applying for the job of a business analyst where all that your employer needs you to do is be fast and a little pumped about it.
  • You will have to show you are with the pace. Your requirement, which will also change, will be completely inhabited by you.
  • In no way will you make your employer feel that you were not able to cope up with the changes. Also, be able to convince your employer with minimal words, what the requirement would be.

44. What other question the employer could ask that the employee would have for him or her?
Answer:

  • As a business analyst, you also would be required to ask certain questions about your job to the client.
  • Generally, a job brief does not necessarily fulfill all the requirements of knowing the details of the job and then you end up asking the interviewer.
  • Here you are required to ask questions like demonstrating your ability to ask better, thoughtful and some really intelligent questions that would be required in the interview. You must necessarily try to pose questions that pertain to your job.
  • You can ask him or her about the salary details, appraisal hike graphs and how it is done and something about perks in the company.
  • You can also clarify with him or her about the criteria for leaving the previous job and coming to you. You can tell them what you expect from the job and various requirements.

45. Can you define the diagrams most used by business analysts?
Answer:

  • Again, the hiring manager wants reassurance you have the skills to get the job done and know case, activity and sequence diagrams.
  • Demand is rising for consultants to support business systems initiatives. Learn more about this trend. 

46. Why did you choose this profession?
Answer:

  • A very typical answer to these questions could be different for different people.
  • Some can say innate interest, some can say for the money or some can also say that it was the closest job to staying close to the business and not directly investing your energy in it.
  • However, a very good answer to the question could be to say you always had an eye for good business.
  • You can narrate examples of how you solved case studies in the classroom and enjoyed doing them, how you have an eagle’s eye as far as understanding and decoding business is concerned. Always stick to the point while answering such a question.

47. What are, according to you, the key strengths of any business analyst?
Answer:

  • Being business analysts is not an easy job.
  • It is a very growing profession which offers the youth with ample of opportunities. This will exceed far more than justify technology skills.
  • Your communication power needs to be as strong and effective as any other requirement in this scenario.
  • You cannot escape by being just someone who does not know things. Keep yourself prepared to speak about the variety of business analyst’s requirements and roles within the given profession.
  • Tell them about some crucial business analyst’s skills that are quintessential for gaining success in the role.

48. Name some of the documents that a business analyst use to handle?
Answer:

Following are some of the common documents that a business analyst use to handle:

  • Project vision document
  • Use cases
  • Requirement Management Plan
  • User stories
  • Requirement Traceability Matrix (RTM)
  • Business Requirement Document
  • System Requirement Specification (SRS)/ System Requirement Document (SRD)
  • Test case
  • Functional Requirement Specification (FRS)/ Functional Specification Document (FSD)

49. What is the requirement elicitation technique?
Answer: 
Requirement elicitation is the process of requirement gathering from stakeholders, users, and customers by conducting meetings, questionnaires, interviews, brainstorming prototyping, sessions, etc.

50. How will you define a good quality requirement as a business analyst?
Answer:

We can measure the quality of a requirement using the SMART rule. As per this rule, a good quality requirement should be:

Specific: The requirement should be specific and could be documented properly

Measurable: Different parameters can measure the success criteria of the requirement

Attainable: The requirement should be feasible within the scope of the given resources

Relevant: The requirement must be in line with the project’s business case

Timely: The requirement should be communicated early in the project lifecycle

51. 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, few important points to be noted among them are listed below.

i) 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.

ii) 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.

iii) Find out a way to meet them personally and have a one on one discussion. By this, you can show your commitment to them.

iv) 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.

v) Continuously engage such difficult stakeholders and make them understand that their contribution is much value for the project.

Note: Browse latest Salesforce Interview Questions and Salesforce Tutorial Videos. Here you can check Business Analyst Online Training details and Salesforce Training Videos for self learning. Contact +91 988 502 2027 for more information.

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