Deconstructing a BA job advert

I saw a job advert on Jobserve and it’s typical of adverts that fail to grasp what a senior business analyst should be able to do for a client.

Click here to read the advert before you proceed.

So what’s wrong with it? I’ll go down through it as […]

Business Rules versus Acceptance Criteria

Update: This post is from April 2012 and has been superseded by one from July 2016: Decision models, user stories and acceptance criteria

One of my readers contacted me recently to ask whether business rules and user story acceptance criteria could be considered the same thing.

Acceptance criteria are […]

What is a business rule?

Junior requirements analysts sometimes have difficulty with how to document business rules for information systems, or indeed, with recognising them in the first place. I hope this short article helps.

Some Definitions

“A rule under which an organization operates. A policy or decision that influences a process step.” (Data […]

Pre-conditions

I have found that people, from business SMEs to software developers, often confuse triggers and pre-conditions.

Whether you are producing a business activity model, a process model (business use case) or a software use case, both concepts are relevant and the distinction is important. It is also important to be able […]

Amongst our business rules are… I’ll come in again

Business rules are key to the efficient and flexible functioning of BPM systems, but what should the analyst do when the Business does not know what the rules are?

Wait a moment! Surely the Business always knows what its own rules are. Not necessarily. Businesses often have to respond quickly to […]