Career Transition from QA to BA Role

Business Analyst is becoming a popular role among IT professionals. A business analyst acts as a common link between stakeholders, developers, testers, and many other teams in a project. His job is to bring the business needs with the IT resources. S/he collects requirements from the stakeholders, analyses them, documents them, and finally communicates these requirements to the development and testing teams.

Day by day, the job of a BA is becoming very challenging and interesting. More and more professionals are trying to switch to this role. One of the groups of such people includes testers.

Due to various attractive reasons such as better career opportunities, engaging and captivating responsibilities, traveling opportunities, many testers think of moving to the business analyst role. There are some skills and benefits that testers have as compared to other professionals, especially software developers, that makes the transition from a tester to a business analyst easier.

Let’s first check why the business analyst career profile looks so appealing-

• It is ideal for people who like problem-solving and presenting their ideas. A business analyst identifies opportunities and works on materializing them.

• It is one of the fastest-growing and high paying jobs with the opportunity to move up the ladder really fast.

• BA solves business problems and hence gets to meet and interact with the core stakeholders or the decision-makers of the business.

• In today’s world of distributed teams and out-sourcing, a BA gets to travel around the world and act as a bridge between the teams across the globe.

Now, let’s see why Testers can ace this role easily and have a better chance of switching to the business analyst role-

• BA must play a crucial role in the requirements analysis phase. BA needs to understand the business needs, objectives of the system to be developed, and so on. Testers can be molded into such a role easily as they have the analytical and logical skills required in this phase. Testers develop such skills while performing the different types of testing as the testing process requires them to test the system with analytical and critical thinking.

• The most important document of the whole project life cycle is the requirements document. It is the responsibility of the BA to create this document with utmost perfection as it serves as a base for subsequent documents such as design documents, test plans, test cases, etc. 

A tester is responsible for creating a test plan, test scenarios, and test cases. These documents, especially test scenarios and test cases require a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the requirements. This experience can easily be used while creating a requirements document. While on the other hand, software developers do not have the essential experience of creating such detailed documents.

• Nowadays, some companies allow and prefer testers to participate in the requirements gathering phase. Testers, who have come across such situations where they could be a part of the initial phases of the project, have the upper hand in getting the understanding of the BA’s job. For a software developer, there are very rare chances where s/he can engage or cooperate in this phase. 

• While testing the system, testers think from both the system and the end user’s point of view. This is exactly what is expected from the business analyst while, eliciting, gathering, analyzing, and documenting the requirements.

• Also, for any tester, the focus of the whole testing phase is on the quality of the developed system. This becomes a plus point while performing the Business analyst’s role. During the initial phase, while gathering and analyzing the requirements, the tester can look at the whole picture; imagine the operational product, and write the requirements in such a way that it helps in developing a system with excellent quality.

• In most companies, one of the job requirements of a business analyst is to test the system. Business analysts are usually involved in the system testing phase. It is obvious that for someone, who has worked as a tester, this part of the business analyst job becomes the easiest task.

Conclusion

The role of the business analyst demands very good communication, negotiation, analysis, and documentation skills. For a tester, transitioning into the role of a business analyst is challenging but not impossible. As we discussed in the above points, it becomes a little easier for a tester to learn and master business analysis skills as many of these overlap with their present roles and responsibilities as a software tester.  

Author’s Bio

Kuldeep Rana is the founder of ArtOfTesting, an educational website, teaching software testing concepts. He is skilled in manual, automation, and performance testing. He loves to share his knowledge and insights on testing by writing and sharing online tutorials on different platforms.