Agile delivery, testing, data skills and the BA interview

Working in agile (Scrum)

• Roles: product owner (prioritises the backlog; BAs often support or act as PO), scrum master, development team.
• Events: sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint review (demo), retrospective, and backlog refinement (where BAs clarify and split stories).
• Artefacts: product backlog, sprint backlog, increment; a definition of ready and a definition of done.
• Tools: Jira (epics, stories, tasks, boards), Confluence (documentation), Azure DevOps.

BAs work just ahead of the team: refining stories for the next sprints, answering questions during the sprint, and reviewing what's built.

Prioritisation

MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Won't this time), value vs effort, Kano model (basic needs, performance needs, delighters), and the business impact of each requirement.

Gap analysis and feasibility

Compare the current state with the desired state, list the gaps, and evaluate options (process change, configuration, custom development, buying a product). Include cost-benefit analysis and risks.

Testing and UAT

• Help write test scenarios from acceptance criteria.
• Support system testing by clarifying expected behaviour.
• Plan and coordinate UAT (user acceptance testing): users test real scenarios; log defects with steps to reproduce, expected vs actual results and severity; get sign-off.
• Change requests: assess impact on scope, time and cost, and get approval.

Data and tools for BAs

• Excel: pivots, lookups, charts for analysing current processes and building business cases.
• SQL: query data to validate assumptions ("How many applications are stuck at verification for more than 3 days?").
• Visio, Lucidchart, draw.io, Miro: diagrams; Figma/Balsamiq: wireframes; Power BI/Tableau: dashboards.

Domain knowledge

BAs are often hired for domain knowledge: banking (loans, payments, KYC), insurance (policies, claims), e-commerce, healthcare, supply chain, telecom. Learn the vocabulary and regulations of the domain you're targeting.

The BA interview

Expect: explaining your approach to gathering requirements; writing a user story with acceptance criteria; drawing a process flow (for example, "ATM cash withdrawal" or "food delivery order"); handling difficult stakeholders; SQL and Excel tasks; and case questions like "How would you reduce customer onboarding time at a bank?"

Structure case answers: clarify the goal and metrics → understand the current process and data → identify pain points and root causes → propose options → recommend with benefits, costs and risks → explain how you'd measure success.

Check yourself

• Draw (on paper) a BPMN swimlane diagram for an employee leave request.
• Use MoSCoW to prioritise five features of a college attendance app.
• What makes a good defect report?