Salesforce Business Analyst

What is acceptance criteria?

*A set of statements, each with a clear pass/fail result, added to a user story. *Specifies conditions under which a user story is fulfilled.

Visual characteristics of a Universal Process Notation (UPN) diagram.

*Activity box *Resource *Line with text *Attachment *Decision *Drill down

What are some examples of elicitation techniques?

*Brainstorming *Document analysis *Focus groups *Interface analysis *Interviews *Observation *Process modeling *Prototyping *Requirements workshops *Surveys/questionnaires

How does well-written acceptance criteria benefit multiple stages and stakeholders of a project?

*Clarifying the scope for the project team *Assisting the development/implementation team. *Ensuring testers know what should be tested

RACI Chart

*Responsible: A person who performs an activity or does the work. *Accountable: A person who is ultimately accountable for the outcome. *Consulted: A person who needs to provide feedback or contribute to the activity. *Informed: A person who needs to know of a decision or action.

Waterfall vs Agile

*Waterfall: Creates critical paths; a project can't move forward until a blocking issue is resolved. *Agile: An iterative approach to development with regular feedback intervals.

Business process engineering steps

1. Documenting the As-Is process. 2. Brainstorming with SME's to identify improvements. 3. Document To-Be process. 4. Train end-users on the new process.

Architecture of a Journey Map

1. Phases - Includes awareness, consideration, purchase, onboarding, and advocacy. 2. Actions - What the customer or user does in each phase. 3. Thoughts - What the user thinks. Changes here often hint that they're entering a new phase in the experience. 4. Feelings - How the customer or user is feeling. Changes here often hint they're entering a new phase as well. 5. Touchpoints - Where your brand, product, or service comes into play. These are the times when you are reaching the customer, or they're reaching you. 6. Context - The environmental, social, and time factors that are important either to your customer's ability to reach their goal, or to the experience of your product or service. 7. Opportunities - Where and how you can have the most impact. Are you reducing pain or reinforcing your strengths?

This process diagram shows the key elements of a process including Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customers.

A SIPOC map.

What does it mean to extract requirements?

A business analyst determines a project's requirements by extracting them from business or government policies, as well as from current and future users, through interaction and research.

When a BA conducts a user story workshop, why is it detrimental to use an undefined user as the who in a user story?

A defined user with clear intentions is a requirement to writing a good user story.

Acceptance criteria

A set of statements, each with a clear pass/fail result, added to a user story.

Sprint

A short, time-boxed period when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work.

Repository

A storage location for software packages.

Use cases

A use case identifies, defines, and organizes the system requirements from the perspective of a user.

When using the Agile framework for project management, how should Kanban teams respond to unplanned work and changes?

Assess the priority of the new request and address it when it's at the top of the backlog.

What does it mean to safeguard requirements?

At regular intervals in the project life cycle, the business analyst safeguards or protects the business and user's needs by verifying functionality, accuracy and completeness of the requirements against the original initiating documents. Safeguarding minimizes risk by ensuring requirements are being met before investing further in system development.

When using the Agile framework, when is a retrospective executed?

At the end of every sprint.

Business Analyst

BA identifies the needs of a business. Documents and verifies the solutions of those needs.

To ensure effective collaboration with stakeholders, which technique would help a business analyst maintain their trust?

Be transparent and truthful.

Benefits of Journey Mapping

Better team alignment, strategic thinking, deeper understanding of pain points, increased empathy, makes a case for innovation, and can be used as a guide for measuring impact.

How do participants generate ideas for user stories?

Brainstorming.

When using the package development model, which metadata changes need to be tracked manually?

Changes to components that are unsupported by source tracking.

What's a proven way to help executives understand how new processes or products can enable change?

Describe how the system can enable business innovation and help customers.

User Stories

Describes the functionality that a business system should provide so that it can be developed. "As a.... I want to... So that I can..."

Gap analysis

Describes the gaps between the current processes and the intended processes.

Journey map

Document that illustrates the experiences users have with a business or an organization.

The three top skills of a business analyst are communication, collaboration, and what?

Documentation.

What should you not do when formulating user stories with your project team?

Don't make any assumptions about how the user stories will be implemented, such as which components or services will be affected. The development/implementation team makes those decisions during their planning meetings.

The drawing forth or receiving of information from stakeholders or other sources.

Elicitation

Change Management

Ensure standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient handling of all changes to IT infrastructure, in order to minimize number and impact of any related incidents upon service or application.

How can acceptance criteria be formatted?

Formatted as if/then statements.

When creating a process map, what is the first high-level step?

Identify the process to map.

Impact Analysis

Identifying the potential consequences of a change, or estimating what needs to be modified to accomplish a change.

A notification that alerts Salesforce users about what's new, in context of the tool, at the right time.

In-App prompt.

How is a change set used during implementation of a new project?

It builds all changed metadata, possibly unrelated, to be deployed at the same time.

Why is the scope statement specification the most fundamental deliverable on any project?

It clearly defines what needs to be achieved and the work that must be done to deliver the project.

The collaboration with stakeholders section of the BA exam covers which key topics?

Journey map, elicitation, and Agile.

Traits of this include: *Visualize workflow *Limit work in progress *Incremental and evolutionary change *Metrics

Kanban.

Which one of these options is a principle of Universal Process Notation (UPN)?

Limit of 8-10 activity boxes on a screen.

Subject Management Experts

May be inside the organization (employees) or outside the organization (customers).

Stakeholders want to enhance the organization's security by requiring users to identify themselves with additional information besides username and password. Which capability should a business analyst add to the project backlog?

Multi-Factor Authentication. MFA is a security measure that guards an organization from a multitude of security threats.

When should a workshop for creating user stories be held?

Near the start of a project.

This type of testing evaluates how the system responds when large volumes of records or operations are being handled.

Performance testing.

Fictionalized characters in which primarily demographic characteristics are represented.

Personas.

A framework used to create visual representations of work processes.

Process mapping.

Who does the project team consist of?

Product manager(s), developer(s), admin(s), users, and so on.

What is an effective way for a business analyst to learn about a customer's challenges?

Read recent industry reports in trade publications. The customer's industry challenges may give insight into current and future trends.

Integrated CRM platform that helps companies transform their businesses by uniting their marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams with a single, shared customer view.

Salesforce Customer 360.

A tool that takes a snapshot of a Salesforce org and looks for potential problems in the implementation.

Salesforce Optimizer.

A tool to track changes in Salesforce.

Setup Audit Trail.

What should acceptance criteria state and not state?

Should state intent, but not a solution. Think what it can do, not how it can be done.

What does it mean to anticipate requirements?

Skilled business analysts know how quickly things change in the dynamic world of IT. Baseline plans are subject to modification, and anticipating requirements that will be needed in the future or that have not yet been considered is essential to successful outcomes

A process for mapping out the connection between a customer's current challenges and goals for the future with realistic next steps.

Storyboarding.

What are the primary roles and responsibilities of a Business Analyst?

System and operations maintenance. Extract, anticipate, constrain, organize, translate, safeguard, simplify, verify, and manage requirements.

Unnecessary complexity in an org that increases the time to deploy new innovations in the future.

Technical Debt.

In most cases, what is the BA's role in User Acceptance Testing (UAT)?

The BA prepares for and guides UAT through completion.

What does it mean to simplify requirements?

The business analyst emphasizes simplicity and ease of use at all times, but especially in implementation. Meeting business objectives is the goal of every IT project; business analysts identify and avoid extraneous activities that do not solve the problem or help reach the objective

What does it mean to verify requirements?

The business analyst is most knowledgeable about use cases; therefore they continually verify the requirements and reject implementations that do not advance business objectives. Verifying requirements is accomplished through analysis, test, demonstration and inspection.

What does it mean to translate requirements?

The business analyst must be adept at translating business requirements to technical requirements. This includes using powerful analysis and modeling tools to match strategic business objectives with practical technical solutions.

What does it mean to organize requirements?

The business analyst must organize requirements into related categories to effectively manage and communicate them. Requirements are sorted into types according to their source and applicability. Proper organization prevents project requirements from becoming overlooked, and leads to optimal use of time and budgets.

Functional Requirements Specification (FRS)

The business requirements that are defined from an end user or business perspective. It will specify the expected outcomes.

Stakeholders

The individuals who make decisions and who have an important role in determining the requirements for a project.

Who should be included in a user story writing workshop?

The project team.

Wireframes

This document contains renderings of the user interface, often in the form of low-fidelity drawings.

System Requirements Specification (SRS)

This document details how the complete system should function and enumerates hardware, software, and functional and behavioral requirements of the system.

Change request logs

This document is a log of all the change requests in the project including date of request, requester, and any other key information.

Business analysis plan

This plan lists all the business analysis activities that will take place throughout the project.

What is the end goal of the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase?

To determine a go/no-go decision prior to deployment.

What is the objective of the User Acceptance Testing (UAT)?

To ensure the product or enhancement that is being delivered meets the expectations of the business.

What does it mean to manage requirements?

Typically, a formal requirements presentation, review and approval session occurs, where project schedules, costs and duration estimates are updated and the business objectives are revisited. Upon approval, the business analyst transitions into requirements management activities for the rest of the IT solution life cycle.

When is User Acceptance Testing (UAT) implemented in the project lifecycle?

UAT is the last step before a release to production.

Process Flow Diagram

Used to document step-by-step process of a business process. It is used to capture functional requirements of a software application. It is also used to identify any loopholes in a particular business process and modify accordingly.

When a BA maps processes, which option is a best practice?

Validate maps. Right after a BA draws a process map, they should review it with stakeholders to ensure it is accurate.

When assessing a new process, which type of diagram should be used to identify waste within and between processes?

Value stream map. A value stream map is used to visualize the flow of material and information that is needed to bring a product to the customer.

How does version control ease the burden of collaboration among team members?

Version control gives flexibility by providing every collaborator with a copy of the entire repository at any time - this provides a way to organize work from many team members.

What does a business analyst hope to learn from documenting the current sales processes?

Where the process needs improvement. This documentation is developed to reveal where the sales process can be strengthened.

What does it mean to constrain requirements?

While complete requirements are essential to project success, the focus must remain on core business needs, and not users' personal preferences, functions related to trends or outdated processes, or other non-essential modifications.

Using a blank, physical canvas (or online equivalent) to help track thoughts and ideas during a meeting.

Whiteboarding.

What are the three components that make up a user story?

Who, what, and why?

When a Business Analyst is creating a journey map, what assumptions are needed to get started?

Why you're doing it and who you're focusing on. These assumptions help a BA focus and ensure that the journey map is relevant.

How should Acceptance Criteria be expressed?

Without any ambiguity about the expected outcome.