Monday, February 25, 2013

BA interview Q&A

The purpose of this blog is to share my experiences, and discuss about common questions and answers (Q&A) asked during a typical interview for a Business Analyst(BA) position. I will discuss Q&A for both business and system level questions. I will also provide sample answers. I sincerely hope that this information will be useful to would be BAs and existing BAs who wants to refresh there interview skills. I would greatly appreciate feedback and suggestions.


What questions you could expect in an interview for a BA position?


The questions can be asked in different ways but the key is to construct and give to the point response. We will discuss questions in this post and answers in the subsequent posts:


Usually most of the interviews start with questions like:
-          Introduce yourself. 
-          Can you tell us about your IT back ground? 
-          Can you tell us about your Business Analysis back ground? 
-          How do you think you are best suited to this position? 
-          What were your roles in the past few projects?


Depending upon the answer the interviewer will ask next set of questions. Some of the basic requirement related questions could be:
 -         What are requirements? 
-          How do you go about collecting requirements? 
-          What are JAD sessions? 
-          What is the role of a BA in SDLC? 
-          What are use cases? 
-          How do you ensure traceability?


If the requirement is technical and employs certain methodology then there could be questions like: 
-          How do you apply Business Process Modeling (BPM) for requirements? 
-          How do you use Unified Modeling Diagram (UML)? 
-          What is the difference between Agile and Waterfall techniques? Which one is better?


If the project uses requirement tools and databases then you could be asked: 
-          What requirement management tools you have used? 
-          Describe SQL joins. 
-          What modeling tools you have used?


In the next post we will discuss answer to the most critical first question:

“How to introduce yourself”?