Here are the problems that I see :
1. There isn't any defined set of methodologies for Business Analyst. The Best practices are not defined, the 'must haves' are not defined.
2. There is no way to validate requirements, code can be tested and many testing tools have evolved to help in testing. But the point is requirements that are elicited are often not validated.
3. The quality folks are often not involved from Day 1, the requirements are so textual that the business imperatives are often lost in English. The use cases are either too short or to descriptive and the business often has no clue that what this 100 page document is for.
4. The use case best practices are for designer and developers to understand not for business stakeholders to validate.
5. New methodologies and best practices like design patterns have made software development more robust and quick, but requirement Analysis still remains unchanged.
6. Though use case are good to capture detail requirement, but methodologies to capture the business process/requirements have still not evolved.
7. Parallel Methodologies like agile are too much implementation oriented and pay less emphasis on requirements and companies find it difficult to use them for big projects.
8. Business Analyst are often not trained in handling difficult stakeholder, 'Business' accountability and availability is missing.
9. And the worse, I have seen many companies where the Business Analyst is not involved through out the project and developers/designers keep on reinventing the wheel again and again. Blame is one the service provider for not able to convince the client, the project manager who often feels insecure by BAs presence as SME and fears loosing control of the team .
Lack of collaboration, poor Project Management leads to more investment in rework rather than in innovation .
The Quality of your requirements is a function of how good the Business Analyst is. Templates and Quality guideline will not help in making the sure that the requirements are up to the point but only to adhere to the quality checklist of your organization.
So how to make sure that the Business Analysis as a field get some its own set of best practices ?
Let us all share our individual best practices that we have gained from our project experience.
