Oct 26 2009 10:00AM GMT
Posted by: Jaideep
business analyst,
business analysis,
Project Management,
Software Project,
software,
business process,
business rule,
customer requirement,
software requirement,
quality,
process,
Development,
business knowledge,
technical knowledge
As stated in my previous post, a Business Analyst is a quite powerful role that establishes the base of a project. It is the first visible pillar for a project which involves communication, leadership, writing, technical and functional skills together. A business analyst has to have a great depth of knowledge of the business on one hand, a sharp understanding power, strong writing skills, great communicator, and a good influencer. Let us see what are the ‘must-have’ skills without which a business analyst can not survive? And why are those skills so important to be a business analyst? Without any relevance to the order in which they are mentioned (as all are equally important) these skills are:
5. Business Knowledge: A good amount of experience/ exposure/ knowledge of customer business are very important for a business analyst
4. Listen and Understand: A business analyst has to be a good listener and with a sharp understanding power without which all the discussions with customer will be fruitless.
3. Technical Knowledge: There will be quite a few technical discussions at customer site. The BA has to be quite conversant with the technologies and methodologies present at his organization.
2. Communication: A business analyst has to be a strong communicator. During the customer meetings, if he does not communicate well about his organization’s capabilities to build up the trust and confidence, probably customer may not gel well with his ideas.
1. Writing skills: Very important skill required for documentation and for conveying the right messages across the board.
Oct 23 2009 10:00AM GMT
Posted by: Jaideep
business analysis,
Project Management,
Software Project,
software,
business process,
business rule,
customer requirement,
software requirement,
quality,
process,
Development
Business Analyst is a quite powerful role forming the base of a project. It is the first visible pillar for a project which involves communication, leadership, writing, technical and functional skills together. A business analyst has to have a great depth of knowledge of the business on one hand, a sharp understanding power, strong writing skills, great communicator, and a good influencer.
For a software company having various new development projects a business analyst has to understand the existing business processes, methodology, rules etc. of the customer, document it (which itself is a specialized task) and hand it over to development team to embed the customer requirements into the software to be built.
For a software (or IT) sales company a business analyst has to sit behind the sales/ business development teams – understanding their current process of acquiring new business or sustaining current business and bring out a better approach, methodology, process to enhance business in terms of new business and holding current business.
For a manufacturing company a business analyst has to understand the process, re-engineer it to enhance the production, product yield, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and reducing defects or rejections.
A business analyst ‘s various caps thus include – business process analyst, business strategy analyst, business methodology analyst thereby becoming a backbone to business process managers, sales teams, management, development teams , product teams, quality teams etc.
Oct 12 2009 10:00AM GMT
Posted by: Jaideep
software product,
Software Project,
customer requirement,
business requirement,
code,
software,
change management,
software implementation
One customer type focuses on current requirement, rightly built, with more flexibility towards the business requirements built-in in the database rather than in the code. They believe that if the software meets their current requirements well, the future requirements will be built in at the need of the hour. The reason for this is that nobody at the moment is sure about the future requirements and when the change will be required. The change could be required one day after the current implementation or after five years. The changes required could be insignificant, small or not so much effort consuming.
Another type of customer is who is more worried about tomorrow without focusing more on the current built. The future requirements which are not too clear at the moment, are guessed by the customer and forced to be built in the product without really understanding if these requirements will ever be used, or if the requirements built are correct as per future needs as nobody can define them correctly at the moment.
Probably if requirement handling is managed more at database level than in the code, it gives more flexibility to the product.
Oct 9 2009 1:17PM GMT
Posted by: Jaideep
Software Project,
software delivery,
Project Management,
project manager,
Project Development,
project implementation,
project stage,
customer requirement,
quality,
product quality,
software quality
I have seen different type of drivers on road: some drive very fast violating all rules and regulations to reach the destination. Can this attitude work in software development and delivery? I don’t think so, if the project manager is more worried about reaching the implementation stage without bothering about the customer requirements, probably he is calling for a big bunch of troubles.
Another set of drivers are overcautious type. They will take lot of time in building customer requirements and will be uncompromising towards quality of product to such an extent that every deadline will be crossed without meeting it. Can such project managers be liked by customers? Or by the management?
Our next category of drivers is ‘stick to the route’ kind. They will never change the route whatsoever is the hurdle is and whatsoever is the impact on the delivery. Can customer accept a project manager who is damn fussy about the requirements?
Some drivers believe in ‘change with the wind’ style. They start for a destination, get a call on the way from the customer to divert to another destination, and the driver agrees happily. Probably this is the quality that customer wants in the project manager these days.
Sep 16 2009 12:00PM GMT
Posted by: Jaideep
Software Project,
software product,
software development,
QC,
quality control,
QC head,
customer requirement,
testing effort,
testing effort estimation,
customer specification,
development plan,
testing plan,
business rule,
business specification,
test case,
performance testing,
load testing,
functional testing,
test effort,
team size,
Test Plan,
development phase,
testing phase,
tester
A new project, a new product development – as a QC head how do you estimate your testing effort?
Well, some quick steps for this:
1. Customer requirements: Customer specifications or requirements captured at the time of initial study period would be a quick reference guide for estimating testing effort. One word of caution is that incomplete or non-documented requirements may lead to wrong estimations for both – development and testing.
2. Business Specifications: Like customer requirements, there are some business rules and specifications that are well defined by the customer representatives that need to be built in the software. Building test cases and performing tests will depend on such requirements and hence the estimation.
3. Testing Scope: What is the overall scope of testing? Performance, Load, Functional, or all will help you in estimating your testing effort, team size, and test plan
4. Development Plan: Development will definitely go in phases. Plan testing accordingly and estimate testing effort in that manner to accommodate parallel or phased testing so that all load of testing does not fall at the end of development phase.
5. Test team size: Testers availability will be major criteria in estimating your test effort.
Sep 14 2009 1:00PM GMT
Posted by: Jaideep
software testing,
Software tester,
Bug,
coding,
software code,
software,
developer,
code,
customer requirement,
business requirement,
business needs
We all know developers and testers both have a tough job all the time. Developers have a key role in developing the software as per customer requirements embedding customer’s business needs into it. Similarly testers have to put all their efforts in ensuring that the software is matching customer specifications flawlessly and is bugs free. In a nutshell both developers and testers have a common goal of ensuring a superior product delivery at customer end. If that is so why there is a never-ending tussle between testers and developers. Why developers feel testers are unnecessarily trying to poke their nose into their affair. Why testers feel that out all the bugs found out by them, most of the bugs would have been already handled by developers if they had done their job more seriously.
All this leads to certain questions about testers and developers which they only can reply to:
1. Testers are not supreme and so are developers. If developers can build so many bugs while writing the code, testers are also bound to leave certain loopholes in their testing. This is universal and never ending story.
2. Most of the testers around the world who test software do not understand very well the purpose behind the testing. They keep oscillating between their role as policing, controlling quality and excessive reporting.
3. Both developers and testers carry a single goal of ensuring good quality of software at the end of the day but still keep blaming each other for the shortfalls.
4. If developers are kept for writing code, it is well understood that they are being paid for writing good code and not bad code. Then why bugs at all? If a developer has been hired for coding, is it wrong at organization level to expect a 100% bug free coding from developers. If they are permitted to write code with bugs, why not every other function in the organization is allowed to perform their daily tasks with errors. Can’t we have perfect coders?
5. If testers find out the bugs, instead of being thankful to them, why developers start finding out reasons of cornering them. Developers are hurt when testers find out bugs in their code, and instead of going into a thanks mode for testers they start going into another mode where they themselves start losing their respect. In turn they start finding out weaknesses in tester’s capabilities, testing criteria or bug reporting process.
6. It is a well proven fact that while fixing reported bugs developers are bound to generate new bugs. Does it not make them circling them around the same product?
7. Testers sometimes have an understanding that if they report less bugs will mean a question mark on their job, which forces them to report many a times non-quality bugs thereby increasing gap between developer and tester.
8. Developers, once they know that the product has to undergo testing, write code so foolishly that they generate lot of unexpected bugs.
9. If testers are hired for finding out bugs, is it not their lack of depth of knowledge that leads to bug explosions at the later stages? Are testers involved in coding, or business study or implementation?
10. If developer’s after reading so many books on development write codes with bugs, I don’t think a good tester criteria should be if he has read a book on testing or not.
Jul 20 2009 10:00AM GMT
Posted by: Jaideep
tester,
Development,
Software Project,
software product,
Project Management,
customer requirement,
test case,
testing report,
test report,
bugs report,
quality control,
QC,
quality,
product quality,
software quality,
developer,
development team,
code writing,
coding
The responsibility of a tester is to ensure the peace of mind of the end users who are going to use the software product. Another target should be to safeguard customer’s investment in the product. In order to discharge this responsibility, the tester should focus all his skills on understanding customer requirements and measures to map it with product built by writing appropriately comprehensive test cases, performing test and preparing a detailed self-explanatory test report. Complex business requirements will require extraordinary level of understanding. Keep in mind the budget and time constraint for performing testing without compromising with the coverage or quality.
The overall impact of testing should be clearly visible on the product built. The bugs reported should bring a sense of belonging with the developers and customer users. Clarity of bugs in testing report should not only help developer to fix defects properly but guide him not to repeat the same type of issues in future releases. This may happen slowly but gradually should help in increasing developer’s performance and quality of code writing. After all the development team should start taking testers as their best friends and well wishers instead of someone who is trying to find out the weakness in code writing.
Jul 10 2009 10:00AM GMT
Posted by: Jaideep
change management,
Project Management,
project timelines,
Software Project,
software build,
test phase,
testing,
software,
customer requirement,
business requirement,
product delay,
product launch,
project phase,
development phase,
software development,
software testing
In my June 15 2009 post – “Do’s (+) and Don’ts (X) in Project Management” http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.co…), I got a query and am posting it here as it is - As mentioned by you in one of your post “Single constant in business is Change”. But often software vendors are too bound by the requirement documents that they fail to gauge the change in the underlying business need that they are trying to cater to. I understand that there are time and cost considerations, but many a times the attitude is not conducive. Could you throw some light on this in your writings…?
First of all let us be clear – we can not just record requirements and seal it. And then stay isolated from customer in building the software. One fine morning communicate to the customer that the product is ready and you are reaching customer site for product launch. If you feel that during the conceptualization, build and test phase customer has no role to play – you are wrong. If the customer thinks just by giving the requirements they will get a good product meeting all their expectations – customer is wrong. Both have to be in tune during the product development. If vendor fails to gauge the change in underlying business need that they are trying to cater to and think if they do so, it will increase their cost and time – again the vendor is wrong. By not doing so – they call for more time and cost. By not doing so – they surely call for more discrepancies, ambiguities, delays and failures. A small investment of time and cost during the build phase to involve customer and take his consent at every step will definitely lead to later on investments, time delays etc.
If attitude is not conducive, it has to be. Customer has to realize that. And customer has to realize the importance of getting involved in each phase of the project rather than assuming that it is vendor’s call and everything will go fine.
The requirements keep changing, as the business. Only thing that varies is the pace of change in requirements. Overlooking changes happening in the business process at customer end after freezing requirements will result only in undesirable product. Both customer and vendor have to understand this and keep overseeing the changes rather than overlooking.
If changes are not recorded and incorporated in time, customer is always going to blame the vendor and may be vendor gets exchanged with another vendor for the same project.
