Have a look at some of my all-time favorite business analysis-related articles, presentations and reference materials. These are items I’ve bookmarked over the years that I think are valuable to anyone interested in learning more about business analysis and other pertinent topics. Check back occasionally as I’ll continue to add great resources over time.
Fundamentals
- 10 Requirements Traps to Avoid – Karl Wiegers
- Customer Rights and Responsibilities – Karl Wiegers
- The Fuzzy Line Between Requirements and Design – Karl Wiegers
- Whither Requirements? – Dave Rooney
- Stop the project plan crash. You are the expert – Adrian Reed
Centers of Competency/Excellence
- Business Analysis Center of Excellence – The Cornerstone of Business Transformation – Kathleen Hass
- BA Centers of Excellence – Prentiss and Wick
Elicitation
- Building a Requirements Foundation through Customer Interviews – Esther Derby
- Discovering Requirements by Trade-offs – Ian Alexander
- The Tactic: Always. Never. Everyone.
Analysis
- Structured Analysis Wiki – Ed Yourdon
Specification
- Writing Good Requirements – Ivy Hooks
- Use Cases: Best Practices – Ellen Gottesdiener
- Why I still use Use Cases – Alistair Cockburn
- Defining Business Rules: What are they Really? – The Business Rules Group
- Business Rules vs. Business Requirements – Gladys Lam
- The Business Rules Manifesto – The Business Rules Group
- Painless Functional Specifications (Part 1 of 4) – Joel Spolsky
- What’s in a Story? – Dan North
- User Stories Quick Reference Guide – Virtual Genius
- Requirements 101: User Stories vs. Use Cases – Stellman & Greene
- Write, Think, Learn – Michael A. Covington
Validation
- Checklist for Fuzzy Requirements – Thomas C. Royer
- The Seven Deadly Sins of Software Reviews – Karl Wiegers
Teamwork
- Top 10 Team Practices – Mike Griffiths
- The Value of Stable Teams – Kelly Waters
- What Do You Value? – Mike Cottmeyer
Methodology
- The Agile Business Analyst – Cottmeyer and Henson
- Up-front Requirements – James Shore
- The Pipelining Anti-Pattern – Mike Griffiths
- 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
- Scrum in five minutes – Softhouse
- JB’s Agile Cheat Sheet
- Wastes of Software Development – Derived from Mary Poppendieck
- The Agile Checklist – VersionOne
Process
- Kotter’s Eight Stage Process of Creating Major Change – Dr. John Kotter
Architecture
- Straight from the Shoulder – John Zachman