Fundamentals of Functional and Business Analyses

Define functional analysis across mathematics, applied behavioral analysis, and transfer pricing, and outline the analyst’s roles. Identify how environments and functions drive problem solving and decisions.

Define functional analysis in IT as identifying, documenting, and validating functional requirements for software and technology solutions; highlight the functional analyst's role and key skills.

The functional analyst defines software functions and features to solve user problems and deliver value, acting as a link between users and the technical team.

Communicate clearly and tailor messages to users, technical teams, business stakeholders, and external requirements as a functional analyst. Translate mockups, interfaces, and business processes while considering legal requirements.

Translate system level requirements into detailed functional and performance design criteria. Define the system as functional elements and map their relationships to form the functional architecture, iterating as needed.

Identify system functions from requirements and stakeholder needs, decompose into sub functions, allocate functional and non-functional requirements, and verify the functional architecture to ensure accuracy, reliability, security, and usability.

Examine how business requirements create a hierarchy of requirements, from a five-minute service goal to subtasks like stock checks, order validation, and rapid payment processing.

Discover requirements by engaging stakeholders through interviews, surveys, workshops, and observations, and refine them with gap analysis to ensure a complete, actionable information technology project scope.

Refine requirements by making them precise, complete, and consistent, clarifying and prioritizing as needed, identifying conflicts and gaps, and reviewing for readability, validation, and approval.

Document requirements with techniques such as natural language, formal methods, diagrams, and tables, using UML and BPMN, then validate through reviews to ensure completeness and stakeholder approval before implementation.

Trace how requirements traceability evolves from vague needs to refined, approved statements, illustrated by bike example: from 'I want the bike' to a red 24in girl's bike with a basket.

Explore how use cases capture functional and non-functional requirements by detailing actors, triggers, preconditions, postconditions, flows, and UML diagrams.

Learn UML overview, contrasting structural diagrams that map static system structure with behavioral diagrams that model dynamic interactions, including classes, packages, use cases, sequences, and states.

Explore how a UML class diagram depicts classes, attributes, operations, and relationships, such as inheritance and association, with the three-compartment class rectangle and visibility, using an address example.

Explore UML activity diagrams to describe sequences and responsibilities across components, using swim lanes and use cases, illustrated by a lamp failure example.

Explore UML component diagrams that map how software components like browser, controller, service, and database interconnect, highlighting upgradability, replacement of components, and independence across logical and physical system aspects.

Learn to model and execute business processes with BPMN and case management notation; cover events, activities, gateways, sequence flows, pools and swimlanes, message flows, artifacts, and Camunda tooling for execution.

Explore Zimmerman diagrams as a CMMN variant of Bpmn, detailing stages, atomic and compound tasks, milestones, event listeners, sentries, discretionary associations, roles, and case file items in a claim.

Explore mockups, wireframes, and prototypes as simplified, static or dynamic models to test functionality, refine design, visualize user journeys for stakeholders, and prepare for acceptance testing without overinvesting.

summarizes the functional analyst role, from requirements and traceability to acceptance testing, and highlights use cases, user stories, UML diagrams, process and data modeling, prototyping, and wireframing.