BA INTERVIEW PREPARATION GUIDE

There are 3 important things that you should keep in mind

when preparing for BA Interviews:
• RESUME
• JOB DESCRIPTION
• GENERAL
Let's understand the above mentioned items in detail.
RESUME:
Check your resume thoroughly with which you have applied for
that particular job. The interviewer has checked your resume
and then shortlisted you for that Job.
So, it's important that each and every keyword that you have
mentioned in your resume, you are aware of it as the
interviewer might validate it by asking questions.
Consider yourself as an interviewer, so what all things you
would like to validate from the candidate from the resume.
Frame those questions and write down your answers.
JOB DESCRIPTION:
Read the job description thoroughly and highlight all the
keywords mentioned in it.
Consider yourself as an interviewer and then frame as many
possible technical and scenario-based questions from those
highlighted keywords.
Prepare answers for those questions and always include
examples in your answers from your previous projects
wherever possible. This shows that you have actually used
those concepts, tools or skills in your past projects.
Here, I have taken an example of the JD from LinkedIn:
Job Description:
• Coordinate with key stakeholders to gather requirements,
analyze, finalize, and receive formal signoffs from
approvers
• Translate requirements into Business Requirement
Document and Functional Requirement Document.
• Facilitate and drive project meetings with both business
and technology teams.
• Good understanding about Agile and SDLC.
• Good knowledge on SQL.
Few questions that can be prepared:
1.How did you gather requirements in your last project? Which
elicitation technique you used to gather requirement? How did
you ensure that all the requirements have been gathered?
2.How do you analyze the requirements? What all techniques
you used to do requirement analysis?
3.What is the difference between a BRD and FRD? Did you
prepare both the document in your project? How do you write
requirements in the document? Do you include any diagrams in
your document, if yes what all and why?
4.Did you write non-functional requirements also in BRD? What
are non-functional requirements and how it is different from
functional requirements?
5.Do you have understanding of Software Development Life
Cycle? What are the phases in SDLC? What role BA plays in
different phased of SDLC?
6.Which SDLC methodology you have worked in last project?
What is the difference between waterfall and Agile
methodology?
7.What are the Agile principles and different ceremonies in
Scrum? (You can frame more questions from Scrum like on User
Stories, Acceptance Criteria etc.)
8.Did you use SQL in your project? When and why did you use
SQL? How many types of Joins are there in SQL? (You can frame
more questions on SQL from Group BY, LIKE, UNION, DISTINCT,
etc.)
GENERAL:
Here you can prepare on below mentioned 3 categories:
• Previous Projects
• Domain
• General BA questions
• Scenario Based Questions
Prepare a project story. You can include below pointers like
Project Name, a brief project description, business problem
statement, stakeholders involved in the project, domain, your
deliverables as a BA, tools you used as a BA, methodology in
which the project was executed, technology used to implement
the solution, and what benefit business got from it.
General BA Question:
1. What are the requirement elicitation techniques? Which one
according to you is the best elicitation technique and why?
2. What is the difference between functional and non-
functional requirements? Explain with the help of examples.
3. What is Use Cases? What are the components of Use Cases?
How do we write a Use Case?
4. What do you mean by scope creep? How can you avoid
scope creep?
5. What is change management process?
6. What is the need of prioritizing requirements? Which
technique would you use to prioritize and why? What factors
you will consider while prioritizing requirements?
7. What is a Use Case diagram? What are the components of
Use Case diagram?
8. What is the difference between BRD and FRD? When do we
write BRD and FRD and why?
9. What is As-IS and To-Be process mapping? How will you do
it?
10. What is requirement traceability matrix?
11. What is the difference between Agile and Waterfall
methodology? Why do you think projects should adopt agile
methodology?
12. What are the agile ceremonies? Explain each of them.
13. What is the difference between Epics, Features, and User
Stories? How do you write a user story?
14. What are acceptance criteria's? When and why do we write
acceptance criteria's? Explain with the help of an example.
15. What is product backlog and Sprint backlog?
16. What do you mean by definition of done?
17. What is Velocity and how it is calculated?
18. What is burndown chart and burnup chart?
19. What is SDLC? How many stages are there in SDLC?
20. What is root cause analysis? How do you perform root
cause analysis?
21. What all UML diagrams you know? What is Data Flow
Diagram?
22. What is the role of BA in Backlog grooming sessions?
23. How do you conduct sprint planning sessions?
24. How will you analyze and validate the requirements?
25. What are the principles of usability?
26. What is user story mapping? How will you split user stories?
27. How will you estimate user stories?

BA Scenario based questions:

1. Describe a situation in which you used your negotiation skills

to successfully convince stakeholders to see things your way.
2. What is your typical way of dealing with conflicts?
3. How you will be able to handle changes to requirements?
4. As a BA, when can you say that all the requirements are
done?
5. Describe a situation when you anticipated potential
problems and developed preventive measures.
6. As a BA, what is the biggest challenge that you have faced
and how did you overcome those challenge?
7. What will be your approach in dealing with senior
stakeholders who have their requirement priorities set but not
sure in which order it needs to be implemented?
8. Consider there are two very senior stakeholders involved in
your project. They both have their different set of priorities and
one of them is objecting to the other. What will be your
approach in resolving such kind of situations?
9. How will you handle and explain your stakeholders when a
very important feature that was agreed to be delivered has
been missed by the development team?
10. There are projects where development teams are
consulted/involved at later stage when BAs gather all the
requirements. Do you think development teams should be
involved in early stages, instead at later stages, and why?
11. Consider there is a requirement where you need to build
automatic traffic controller. What questions will ask your
stakeholders regarding this? What are factors you will keep in
mind when designing the solution?
12. Consider clients are giving requirements that does not meet
SMART criteria? What will be your approach in dealing with
such requirements?
13. Consider a situation where the development team is saying
that implementation of a particular feature is not possible but
at the same time your stakeholders want that feature to be
implemented as that is very important. How would you handle
such situation?
14. Consider a situation where you have committed a deadline
for the deployment of features and you were not able to meet
that deadline due to some internal project issues. How will you
explain your stakeholders?
15. Did you come across any such situation where you found
that a particular tool/technology is important for a project but
you have not worked on that tools earlier? What did you do in
such situation?

All the Very Best