Classic Business Analysis Articles

Welcome to Practical Analyst, a site specializing in practical insight for business analysts and project professionals. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on Twitter. Thanks for stopping by!

I was sorting through some of my bookmarks and articles I’ve accumulated over time via the Web, and found that there are a few articles that I  seem to refer back to time and again. I’ve provided links below to several articles/presentations I consider to be “classics” in the field of business analysis and requirements engineering that I think any analyst would benefit from reading.

Some are relatively new, and some have been around for quite a while but are still every bit as valid as the day they were published.

I hope you’ll get as much use and enjoyment from these articles as I have.

Analysis/Requirements

• Building a Requirements Foundation through Customer Interviews – Esther Derby
• Use Cases: Best Practices – Ellen Gottesdiener
• Why I still use Use Cases – Alistair Cockburn
• The Fuzzy Line Between Requirements and Design – Karl Wiegers
• Structured Analysis Wiki – Ed Yourdon

Architecture

• Straight from the Shoulder – John Zachman

Communication/Collaboration

• Customer Rights and Responsibilities – Karl Wiegers

Methodology

• No Silver Bullet – Fred Brooks
• Lean Primer – Craig Larman and Bas Vodde
• Software Development as a Cooperative Game – Alistair Cockburn
• Agile Analysis – Scott Ambler
• The Agile Manifesto and the Twelve Principles of Agile Software

If you have any “classics” that you’d like to share, please comment so I can add to my collection and readers can add to theirs, too.

Keep an eye on this post – I’ll add more “classics” as I come across them.