by Thomas Hathaway | Dec 17, 2019 | Musings of a Mad BA, Requirements Gathering
If you are a business analyst, do you ever get the feeling that stakeholders avoid you? As you are walking around the building, do you see developers avoiding eye contact? Worse yet, do you notice testers actively making detours that take them on a path that will...
by Thomas Hathaway | Dec 10, 2019 | Business Analysis Careers, Musings of a Mad BA
Buy at Zazzle A lot of people seem to think that the always-on Internet has a detrimental effect for those of us who suffer Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). I was officially diagnosed with ADD at the age of 49 but I had it all my life. Wellllll . . ., maybe not ALL...
by Thomas Hathaway | Nov 26, 2019 | Artificial Intelligence (AI), Musings of a Mad BA
Mouse pad - buy at Zazzle KRYPTOS: The Database that Programmed Itself Many years ago (in the pre-PC era), I designed and developed a self-learning program called KRYPTOS. Without going into killer detail, KRYPTOS was a program that stored its own source code in a...
by Thomas Hathaway | Nov 19, 2019 | Musings of a Mad BA
Buy at Zazzle I called a Subject Matter Expert recently to schedule a meeting to discuss her business requirements for a new product. She replied that she was about as excited about that meeting as she was about scheduling an invasive, minor medical procedure she...
by Thomas Hathaway | May 1, 2018 | Agile Business Analysis, Musings of a Mad BA, Requirements Management
How Do You Decide? Requirements are fundamentally a tool for simplifying future decisions. They pose either hard (“must have”) or soft (“might have”) limits on future decisions that you or someone else has to make. Anytime you want to build (or...
by Thomas Hathaway | Mar 9, 2014 | Business Analysis Careers, Musings of a Mad BA
… continued from Part 2 Business Analysis Techniques Applied to Real Life When we arrived in Tampa, we followed a time-honored approach to assessing a potential new home (one lesson learned from 63 moves, by the way) by renting a house with reasonable access to both...
by Thomas Hathaway | Feb 25, 2014 | Business Analysis Careers, Musings of a Mad BA
… continued from part 1: Applied Business Analysis Technique – Prioritizing Your Requirements The only unanswered question was to where. The methodology we were following indicated that we should first define our requirements for where we wanted to live, so we...
by Thomas Hathaway | Feb 11, 2014 | Business Analysis Careers, Musings of a Mad BA
Business Analysis Techniques Applied to Real Life I recently posted a blog in which I proposed that business analysis techniques could benefit anyone, in their private as well as their professional life. I wrote the post in my typical, rather abstract writing style...
by Thomas Hathaway | Jan 28, 2014 | Musings of a Mad BA, Validation and Acceptance Testing
I recently recognized that we who wear the Business Analysis hat are actually in the garbage business. This may sound controversial on the face of it, but let me explain. Early pioneers of information technology experienced an obvious epiphany when they expressed the...