All too often, companies mistakenly believe that software developers can single-handedly make their projects a success. However, how can you bridge the gap between technical details and the business agenda to make sure both are aligned in your software development process? That's when you need a business analyst to have your back and communicate your needs to developers.
In this article, we'll explore the fundamentals of business analysis, debunk common misconceptions, and share the benefits of hiring a business analyst (BA) for your project.
What is business analysis?
Business analysis generally refers to a batch of activities that help elicit, validate, and address business needs, requirements, problems, and solutions to calibrate the final product with the stakeholders’ vision. The input of a business analyst is recurrent and is present at all stages of the mobile app development process. Business analysts act as bridges between technical teams and clients, ensuring a unified vision.
The purpose of business analysis can take three forms as the project progresses:
- The first goal is to fully understand the business idea before proposing a solution.
- The second goal is to ensure the right level of user needs and relevant features are uncovered to meet the team’s definition of being ready to start the development process.
- The third purpose is to help build a full-fledged solution with minimal risks and costs.
Why business analysis matters for your software development
Around 75% of VC-backed startups fail. Failures can occur for a myriad of reasons, but running out of cash, shortcomings in product development or business model, and a lack of market need are by far the most common culprits. Business analysis can help you back this trend and set your software development project up for success. Here's how.
App market relevance
Market research is the fundamental starting point of the software development lifecycle. Its main goal is to determine the unique way you can position your solution in the market and prove its market viability. Considering the neck-breaking competition, business owners would spend months combing through competitors and their unique selling propositions.
Business analysts take over full-throttle market research and help you answer the following questions:
- What's your target audience?
- What are your competitors?
- What are your solution's strengths and weaknesses?
- What is your solution's goal, and does it align with real-world user needs?
As a result, companies have a detailed and data-driven software concept. This helps prioritize core features for an MVP that’s perfectly aligned with market needs, the latest niche trends, and user needs.
Accurate requirements elicitation
Business analysts help gather and document requirements for new features and enhancements, working closely with stakeholders across the organization. By understanding the business goals behind a software project, they can create detailed user stories that developers and testers can use to create a tangible plan of action.
The output of this effort is a set of functional and non-functional requirements that can be used to guide solution design, development, and delivery. This ensures that software solutions are designed and developed according to business needs.
Defined success metrics
Without clear metrics, a company is navigating without a map. Hard numbers are essential for demonstrating the value of your product to investors, testing hypotheses, and making informed decisions about product development, marketing, and sales.
Based on your product specifics, business analysts will hand-pick a list of product success metrics aligned with your strategic objectives, facilitating success tracking after your product's launch.
Reduced software development costs
Many companies invest in unnecessary features that gather dust rather than generating revenue. The problem of redundant functionality is the direct result of poor or absent business analysis that leads to gold plating and mismatched requirements.
Conversely, business analysts use a set of tested prioritization techniques such as story mapping, MoSCoW, and others to narrow down the features with maximum user value. This also helps avoid costly rework in the future.
Balanced team workload
Without a business analyst, the software development team has to fill the gap. Project managers, developers, and solution architects often end up stretched too thin, taking on business analysis work alongside their primary responsibilities. This increases the risk of poor analysis and inaccurate requirements.
| Title | Additional responsibilities without a business analyst | Responsibilities with a business analyst |
|---|---|---|
| Project manager | Identifies top-level requirements and writes specifications. | Carries on with the usual tasks such as making sure projects stay within budget and timeframe. |
| Designers | Do constant design revisions and wait for them to be approved as new requirements pop up. Designers may not take into consideration hidden logic or may misunderstand it. | They are focused on design tasks only. Based on the detailed requirements, designers have a holistic understanding of the final product, its design architecture and visuals. |
| Developers | Identify more detailed requirements instead of writing code. | Developers are focused on writing the code. They still find bugs and unforeseen scenarios, but they report the problem to the analyst. |
| Quality assurance engineers | Encounter undefined scenarios and are engaged in identifying requirements. | Perform extensive testing to deliver a high-quality product. |
As you can see from the chart, when there’s no business analyst on the team, the responsibility for the Technical Requirements Document falls on everyone. This often results in a fragmented vision and an inconsistent development process, which ultimately drives up both costs and timelines.
Business analysts take that burden off the team. They create a comprehensive project “wiki” that details the project’s logic and outlines potential use cases and scenarios for each component. They also act as project mentors, helping bridge the gap between development and the business. With all roles in place, each team member can stay focused on their core responsibilities, while the business analyst ensures everything stays aligned with business goals and processes.
Enhanced communication
Software development is a melting pot of ideas, perspectives, and approaches. Unless there’s a dedicated person who can orchestrate and synthesize these various inputs while also making sure business goals remain at the front, the project's vision can become muddled.
The Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (which is a global standard of practice for business analysis) recognizes communication skills as a foundational competency for business analysts. By effectively conveying information, building relationships, and fostering collaboration, business analysts act as facilitators, establishing a stable rapport between developers and stakeholders.
Look at the picture below and try to imagine what the communication flow would look like without a business analyst.
A business analyst also finalizes the requirements before the development stage, making sure the client is fully aware of the project scope. Among other things, a business analyst also conducts scope alignment calls, requirements review calls, and demo calls with the client and team to ensure everyone has a shared understanding of the project.
This uninterrupted communication link helps avoid redesigns caused by a divergence of views between the customer and the development team.
Top misconceptions about business analysts
Most companies, especially startups, want to deliver an MVP on an accelerated timeline. This drive for speed often leads to cutting corners, including skimping on business analysis. Several misconceptions contribute to this perception, leading companies to believe they can skip this step. Here are the most common myths debunked.
Myth #1: "We already know what we want"
Very few clients come with a fully shaped vision and low-level details of the project. Most often, the collaboration starts with a vague requirement, like "I want a telemedicine app like Healow.” While this request may seem straightforward, it's not enough to go ahead with the development. Does the client need it to be HIPAA-compliant? Will the app integrate with existing Electronic Health Record (EHR) or Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems? If so, which ones? What are the core functional requirements, such as scalability and performance?
Although the client comes with a business problem, they aren't always able to nail it or align it with the right technical solution. Conversely, business analysts don't just take the client’s request and go with it. They first conduct comprehensive research to validate the client's idea or suggest a more suitable option, both technically and business-wise.
The goal of the analyst is to help the client identify the problem and develop a solution that takes into account business requirements, user needs, system limitations, and budget.
Business analysts also challenge the client's product throughout the development process with questions like "Why? What for? What problem do we want to solve?". These questions may seem obvious, yet they are essential for being on the same page with the development team.
Myth #2: “We're a small company, we don't need formal business analysis”
Then there’s the misconception that business analysis is a luxury reserved for big companies with big budgets. Smaller companies often operate on tight budgets, thinking that business analysis is just another expenditure item that can be easily eliminated to cut costs. The “we are agile” mentality, also common among emerging companies, can cause them to skip formal planning and documentation.
In reality, detailed business analysis benefits projects of all sizes. And not just benefits — it ensures there’s no scope creep, missed opportunities, and costly rework.
Myth #3: "We can figure it out as we go"
The idea that requirements can evolve during Agile-based software development can make companies think that decisions can be made on the fly during the development process. While requirements can change based on customer feedback later in the project, you still need a set of solid requirements to build on and guide development.
Business analysis provides a structured approach to defining requirements and managing change.
Myth #4: "We have a technical expert who understands the business"
Sometimes, companies have a CTO, a tech-savvy project manager, or even a talented developer on their side who has a great sense of business context and the company’s operations. So, companies automatically assume that this technical understanding equates to the specialized skills of a business analyst.
But while those tech experts can speak the same language as their company, they may lack the skills to translate the company's needs into actionable requirements for the development team.
Business analysis process: step by step
To help you better understand the mechanism behind business analysis, we’ll briefly describe the contribution of a business analyst at each development stage.
Stage 1. Product discovery
Although the business analyst is present throughout the entire software development process, their role is most explicit during the project discovery phase. BAs lay the foundation for a successful project by dissecting the problem, defining the scope, and identifying potential solutions.
Business analysis doesn't boil down to collecting requirements when clients just communicate their ideas in a raw format. Business analysts need to dive deep into the company’s processes, business needs, and product ideas to gather the implicit information needed to define a clear scope and set of requirements.
- Analyzing stakeholder needs — The BA conducts interviews, workshops, and other elicitation techniques to gather data from business users, executives, target users, and other stakeholders about their needs, pain points, and expectations.
- Defining the problem statement — The BA teams up with stakeholders to determine the business problem or opportunity that the project aims to address. Essentially, it’s the why behind the project that permeates almost every artifact and activity.
- Prioritizing core features — Based on user needs and business goals, business analysts help determine the absolute minimum set of features required for the MVP to deliver value and validate the core concept.
- Analyzing non-functional requirements — Business analysts, along with other stakeholders, assess the desired levels of quality, performance, and security.
- Defining high-level functional requirements — BAs lay the foundation for a Software Requirements Specification by identifying the system's intended functions, operations, and behaviors.
- Scoping the project — together with the rest of the team, BAs clearly identify what is in and out of scope for the MVP and help identify the right success metrics for a product.
- Creating the main backlog — business analysts contribute to the initial product backlog by translating user needs into high-level user stories and epics (larger features) that represent the core functionality and value of the proposed product.
- Initial prototyping — BAs may also collaborate on initial prototypes or wireframes to visualize key functionality and gather early feedback.
At Orangesoft, we run 2-5 week discovery sessions to help startups lay a comprehensive foundation for their product, including concept and strategy development, a software requirements specification, clickable prototypes, a business model, and detailed time and cost estimates.
Stage 2: Development planning
When the initial requirements have been gathered and analyzed, the development team needs to figure out the “how” behind the project, i.e., the technological foundation. Business analysts assist in creating the roadmap for the development journey:
- Refining requirements — BAs further break down the high-level requirements into specific, actionable functional and non-functional requirements.
- Establishing acceptance criteria — Business analysts define clear acceptance criteria for each requirement, detailing how to test and validate them.
- Prioritizing requirements — BAs work with stakeholders to prioritize requirements based on their business value, urgency, and feasibility.
- Supporting planning activities — BAs help project managers and developers estimate the effort required for development tasks and identify potential risks that could impact the project.
Stage 3. Implementation
Although the lion's share of business analysts' work is done pre-development, they contribute to all development stages, supporting designers, developers, and the QA team during implementation. They identify areas for improvement during the design phase, track the development process, and conduct readiness reviews after testing.
- Clarifying requirements — BAs serve as a point of contact for the development team, explaining requirements and addressing any questions.
- Supporting design and development — Business analysts also participate in design and development decisions, always championing the business's best interests in all decisions.
- QA support — BAs may assist the QA team in reviewing test cases and verifying that the implemented functionality meets the acceptance criteria.
The business analyst is the custodian of project information. This is the person who answers all of the team's questions during project development and makes sure the entire team is on the same page.
Stage 4: Post-launch maintenance and product enhancement
Post-release, the development team usually monitors the product and collects feedback from users. Business analysts are the ones who analyze the feedback from stakeholders and users from a business perspective. Based on the feedback, BAs create the next backlog, prioritizing features and bug fixes that will deliver the most business value.
Add business analysis professionals to your project
There are a thousand things that could go awry during the development process. Our team of business analysts accelerates your success and helps deliver user-centered, business-focused software solutions.
At Orangesoft, business analysts make sure you and the developers speak the same language, and they prepare the requirements and documentation for your project development. Drop us a line, and we'll help you get your project off to a good start.