Business Analyst

What are the tools used by Business Analyst to gather requirements. Do they do it using, MS Word, Visio, MS Project or are there any specific tools?

Questions by hshravan

Showing Answers 1 - 12 of 12 Answers

priyankam9

  • Apr 27th, 2008
 

For a Business Analyst the following are used as
MS Word(to gather Requirements)
MS Visio(To depcte the flows)
MS Excel(To represent Data)
MS Power Point(To do presentations)

Apart from these there BA use the following tool to gather requirements and to depict the flows
IRise Manager(This is an excellent requrement Gathering tool, goto www.irise.com to get more info about this)
Rational Suite(used to gather requirements and depict the flow, goto ibm.com to get more information on this)
Mercury Quality Centere -  Testing tool used by BA/QA to get the test Requirements, Test Cases, Test Scripts.

It really depends on the company and the project,
I mainly use:

Rational Requisite Pro = Requirement Management.
MS Word = Writing documents such as Vision, SRS's, UseCases, etc.
MS Visio = UML diagrams such as Activity diagrams, UseCase diagrams.
ConceptDraw = pretty similar to MS Visio.
MS Powerpoint = Presentations in JAD sessions, etc.
ClearCase, ClearQuest, Mercury TestDirector/ QualityCenter = Testing, mostly UAT.
SQL = Database queries, Benefitial especially in the elicitation phase.

Since most companies these days use Rational Unified Process (RUP methodology) it would be really usefull for you to learn a bit about Rational Requisite Pro, Its an excellent tool for Requirements Management and PM's and BA's Love it!
It makes it really easy to manage requirements, create Requirements Tracebility Matrix, communicate with team members and more.

you can download a free trial from ibm.com

*Learning about Testing tools( TestDirector, Quality Center) and SQL is not really required as a BA, but it would increase your value as BA ;)

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feverx4u

  • Feb 1st, 2009
 

Few more


1 Test Director: Requirements traceability tool.
2 IRise Manager (This is an excellent requirement Gathering tool, go to
irise.com to get more info about this)
3 Rational Suite (used to gather requirements and depict the flow, go to ibm.com
to get more information on this)
4 Mercury Quality Center - Testing tool used by BA/QA to get the test
Requirements, Test Cases, Test Scripts.


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