Lately, companies all over the world have started to use business analysis in their work processes much more, as it is an effective tool for development and growth. According to the data from Statista, the revenue of numerous companies has increased by USD 152,3 bln US for 7 years (from 2015 to 2022).




In a nutshell, business analysis is a set of tasks and methods linking the interested parties (stakeholders): IT vendors and businesses ordering software development. This helps companies make the structure, politics, and operations of the organization clear. Business analysts also can recommend solutions that help a business reach the set goals. Business analysis is one of the IT consulting services with the goals to discipline and improve the development process, meet all the requirements and needs of the business, shorten their timing and financial costs, raise the profit from the launched software product, and make the business’s clients satisfied.



First, let’s check what business analysis is used for.

What is business analysis for?

In case business analysis is used when software developing, the opportunity to ensure the growth and successful development of a business, to correct and make the existing processes better appears and gets more real. That can influence different aspects of a company’s performance positively. Moreover, the work of business analysts optimizes the timing and expenses.

To give practical proof for the claimed advantages, let us perform a couple of examples from the development of software.

About the reason for the successful development of Tinder

This is a bright case of dating app development. The app was launched in 2012 first on iOS and then on Android.

The app checks the users’ location to suggest potential matches, and people choose each other for further communication by swiping the profiles right (to like someone) or left (to dislike someone). In case the users from both sides have liked each other, they can text and start talking. The users of Tinder can link their profile to a phone number or a social network (Instagram, Facebook, or Spotify) and add a brief biography or description of themselves.

By 2014, 1 bln swipes per day were taking place in the application. Then, the company added an extra subscription service giving a wider range of features to the app.

In 2017 a web version of Tinder was launched. In 2018 the number of subscribers was 3,8 million! Tinder gets about 57 million active users every month.

Thus, we can see that the development and growth of the company are graduate. We also can notice this fact if we glance at their revenue data.

Annual direct revenue of Tinder from 2015 to 2021 (in million USD) – according to Statista.com

In the chart above, we can see that the profit of Tinder has been growing step by step. It means that all the actions, changes, and decisions of the team working with the software and the whole business are thoroughly thought over, weighed, and after that implemented and analyzed again. That is exactly what companies get with the help of using a business analysis process.





Now, let’s make the way to developing a business successfully clear – let’s look through the business processes.

Business analysis process

The general scheme of business analysis stages is below.

The business analysis process framework.

🔴 Step 1 – Making the orientation

At this step, the key aim is to clarify the business objectives, requirements, and scope for the development project. Performing the step ensures that the process of creating software will be effective, fast enough, and a confident investment for the business intending to launch it.

Business analyst process flow at this stage

Here, a business analyst aims to meet the stakeholders’ needs, define the goals and scale for a project, understand the history of the project (this action helps avoid repeating any earlier made solutions), and understand the current situation of the business that needs to be corrected.

🔴 Step 2 – Finding the key business goals

This step aims to discipline the planned processes. Clarifying the business needs and agreeing with the parties facilitates forming the fastest way of launching the project and making it succeed. That’s why it’s also important to define the scope of the development product.

Business analyst process flow at this stage

Analysts are to uncover what the stakeholders expect from the development project (they use several techniques for that, we’ll talk about them further in the article), find compromise and make an agreement in case any expectations contradict each other and make sure the expectations are clear and real to reach.

🔴 Step 3 – Scope defining

Performing this step provides the project team with the concept of moving forward for meeting the business requirements and needs. The clarified work volume makes it more realistic to “feel” the needs so that the project participants can realize their own roles and contribution to the project product and its implementation.

Business analyst process flow at this stage

Analysts’ responsibilities at this step involve defining the solution approaches to meet the business objectives, defining the scope, agreeing with the parties, and ensuring the planned costs make sense and are rational.

🔴 Step 4 – Creating the business analysis plan

This step also disciplines the whole development process and provides clarity on what exactly is going to be implemented when creating. This plan normally gives the answers to plenty of questions appearing from different participants of the project.

Business analyst process flow at this stage

Analysts are to choose the practical results of the business analysis process considering the project scope, methodology, and other key aspects, to make a clear list of the business analysis results, covering the whole scope, and to define the participants of creating and checking each result.

🔴 Step 5 – Defining the requirements

The step aims to provide the development team with all the necessary info. This process also makes the scope possible to get implemented. This step excludes the developers’ confusion when creating software.

Business analyst process flow at this stage

Analysts elicit the info needed for understanding the wishes of the business about specific features or changes in the process. Then they analyze the found info and use it for creating a first draft of the expected results including the requirements in detail. Additionally, analysts review and validate each result with the business representatives and stakeholders, and ask the questions they got when doing the previous actions.

🔴 Step 6 – Supporting the technical implementation

The main goal of the step is driving the project to success and checking if all the business objectives are met.

Business analyst process flow at this stage

Analysts review the solution design here to ensure it meets the necessary requirements and look for opportunities to meet the extra ones without making the technical scope of the project higher. Moreover, the specialists update and/or repackage the documentation to make it useful for both design and implementation processes. Analysts interact with the quality-providing specialists to make sure they understand the business context of the technical requirements (it also may include reviewing test plans and/or cases to check if they have a clear understanding of functional requirements). Analysts are supposed to be ready to answer any questions and assist in resolving any difficult situations raised when designing, implementing, or testing stages of the project development. Business analysts manage the changes of requirements to ensure that everyone in the team is working with the actual documentation and all the interested parties (stakeholders) participate in all the solutions connected with the changes.

When it’s appropriate, business analysts check if the software product meets both the users’ and business’s needs. All the mentioned actions help the development team to provide the project with maximum benefits and ensure the made investment (the development costs) turned into a positive result.

🔴 Step 7 – Assisting the business in implementing the solution

It sometimes happens that the team suggests a great solution corresponding to the business objectives, but the users don’t use it according to that. This fact may lead to failure in achieving the initial goals. That’s why business analysts are getting involved in this step more and more often to support the business.

At this step, analysts check if all the parties (including the users) are ready to accept the changes planned for the project.

🔴 Step 8 – Assessing the value of the solution

Without a doubt, the whole development process is very voluminous, as it includes plenty of processes. That’s why it can get rather complicated to clear up the value at the end. So it’s very important to stop for a while and assess the value created by the solution. It helps to check if the results are really gotten due to the successful implementation.

Business analyst process flow at this stage

To perform this step, analysts assess the factual result according to the business objectives, to demonstrate to what extent the initial tasks have been completed. Then they present the results to the business representatives (the client of an IT vendor) and other parties. Moreover, they suggest further possible solutions for the full realization of the business aims or for the new problems found when assessing the project impact.

This is how a typical business analysis process normally happens.

Now, let’s move on to the important tools and techniques used in business analysis and make it clear what exactly they give to companies.

Useful techniques of business analysis

The whole range of tools and techniques is pretty sizable, that’s why we’ll list the most common ones.

⚫️ MOST

The name of the technique is the acronym for Mission, Objectives, Strategies Technique. It lets a business analyst perform a thorough analysis. It focuses on the business goals and the ways to reach them.

⚫️ PESTLE

This name is also an acronym. The full version is Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal, and Environmental. The technique helps companies take into account all the external factors possible to affect the business processes and find ways of avoiding or resolving them.

⚫️ SWOT

The name of this technique is a short variant for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threatens. The technique helps companies define strong and weak sides and lets them distribute the needed resources.

⚫️ MoSCow

This technique is also known as “Must or Should, Could or Would”. It allows businesses to prioritize the requirements, making a structure where each requirement is assessed as related to the others.

⚫️ CATWOE

The acronym here is for Clients, Actors, Transformation process, World view, Owner, and Environmental constraints. This technique helps identify the processes any action performed by a business can affect.

⚫️ The 5 Whys

The technique includes leading questions allowing the analysts to find out the root cause of any problem. The analysts are supposed to ask why the situation has appeared.

All the listed techniques aim to help provide the future success of the development product.

The scheme below demonstrates the benefits a business gets including the processes of business analysis in the development.

The benefits for a company from the business analysis process in software development.

The steps described in the block above and the techniques ensure the successful launch of a product, getting the profit to the company, satisfying the users’ expectations and needs, and making the software product popular among its target audience.

Hiring qualified specialists (business analysts) is the right way to organize everything well.

Now we see the importance of business analysis when developing. Thus, it’s also vital to know how to choose the right pro. So, further, we’ll talk about the key moments for that.

How to identify a reliable business analyst?

⚪️ Qualifications

Here, we normally check the basic educational degree in a field related to IT business. That can be either an Undergraduate one (Bachelor’s). 

An extra option is a Master’s Degree. It usually makes a candidate more valuable because of a higher level of theoretical knowledge.

Moreover, there are plenty of various certifications suitable for the business analyst position. In some cases, they can replace a degree, but it’s much better when a candidate has then in addition to the basic education, as it proves that the knowledge is wide enough. Thus, the person can perform more tasks in a quality way.

⚪️ Experience

The first great way to get practice for a newbie is an internship. If a young specialist has done it in a development company, it already proves that he has an idea of the IT sphere and the business processes in it.

In a nutshell, the more work experience an analyst gets, the more tasks he can do, and the more reliable he gets. And, of course, the more business process analyst skills he gets.

⚪️ Skills

• Analytical mindset – the ability to examine necessary info, analyze it, and make rational judgments on it. A company can get better solutions for the business.
• The ability to find patterns: this skill gives a specialist the ability to suggest improvements and solutions for different situations and problems based on the found patterns. It helps to observe a situation of a business as widely as possible.
• The ability to run others allows analysts to get what they need from others with communication. This skill is very useful for reaching the business’s objectives. The success of a product concept implementation depends mostly on it.
• Creative presentation skills help in making all the parties agree on any controversial items, as analysts must be able to present any needed info in an easily understandable way. It’s also helpful for avoiding misunderstandings among the stakeholders.
• Modeling skills are crucial. The more of them a specialist has, the higher quality of his job gets. The business possesses analyst skills develop only when working in practice. Sometimes, an analyst has to spend most of the work time doing various business models. These skills help reach the best final product quality.
• Business knowledge and social skills to get it. We emphasize this item, as business analysts are normally very busy with functional work. It means, only curious and prospective pros can get this skill. So, it’s important to hire an analyst able to get maximum info about any business sphere, as it adds quality to the whole development process implementation. The more info about a business an analyst knows, the more valuable and quality his work gets for the companies he works with. These business process analyst skills help get the best results.

To sum up this block, we recommend checking the mentioned items when looking for a business analyst for any software development, as we base on our 8-year practical experience in creating software.



It also sometimes happens that a business willing to hire a business analyst has limits in the budget for that. So, let’s check possible ways of saving the money of a company for business analysts.

How to save money for specialists in business analysis with a limited budget?

There are 2 main ways for that: outsourcing and outstaffing from a software development company.

Outsourcing involves the transfer of secondary functions of the company to a third-party specialized subcontractor. Outsourcing is based on the signing of a long-term contract and provides an opportunity to receive professional support in a certain area for an extended period. Outsourcing allows companies to improve the quality and efficiency of core activities, as well as free up the human and financial resources of the business.

Outstaffing. The peculiarity of this type of employment is that part of the company’s personnel is removed from the staff and legally registered in the outstaffing company, however, it performs its duties within the framework of the tasks of the customer company. From a legal point of view, an employee’s employment relationship arises with an out-staffer company, and not with a customer company. At the same time, the out staffer provides services to the customer under a contract for the provision of services for a fee, and the latter pays for them.

Thus, we can say that the main difference between the two types of services is that outsourcing is the transfer of certain functions of the company to the contractor, and outstaffing is the contractor’s employees.

The main common feature of outsourcing and outstaffing is that the task of both types of services is to minimize risks, and financial and resource costs for non-core activities of companies, optimize taxes, and reduce personnel costs.



Another question that may worry startup companies is “Can business analysis be helpful for us?”. So, let us comment briefly.

Business analysis for a startup

The observed in the 1st block of the article example with Tinder is about a company that is rather well developed and spread. Our description doesn’t involve the details on how business analysis processes can help in launching a startup.



To summarize our topic, we offer to pay attention to our pros. Let’s go!

Business analysts on our team

According to the fact that the items for identifying a qualified analyst for a team are based on our experience, all of our business analysts correspond to all of them. The analysts have a basic education (different degrees), extra completed courses (with certificates proving that), and work experience from 3 years.

Here are a couple of examples of business analysis services that our specialists can provide.

🔴 Project Discovery

This service is useful for companies starting with just a development idea or intending to make a significant update to their existing product.

This business analysis service includes the analysis of the future project, audience, and tech perspectives.

In frames of the service, the analysts check the concept, make the feasibility real, and refine the scope according to competitive advantages, users’ requirements, business needs, and market limits. Then, they do tech analysis and create a solution covering all tech details to make and scale the development product. Moreover, the analysts make a project realization plan, budget estimate, team structure, and risk management plan to ensure the business is successful through managed and predictable IT product launches.

🔴 Requirements Management

To make a fundamental base for product development, it’s a must to define full and clear software requirements. The service involves defining business needs, vital features, and expected business results and their transformation into requirements specifications. Our business analysts shorten the gap between the parties (the business and the developers’ team), assist prioritization of backlog, refine requirements in detail, and support the whole development process up to release, and even after.

To get information about the full list of business analysis services of our team, complete the form to contact us.