Requirement elicitation is commonly mentioned among business analysts, but where do these requirements originally come from? It is quite complicated to understand and start collecting the required functionality as the product stakeholders’ explanations are often ambiguous, diverse and lacking of technical terminology. But how do you manage to identify and write down all the functionalities required by the stakeholders, the user roles and their actions? The answer is pretty simple – you have to perform a use case analysis in order to capture the contracts between the system and its users and then refine the system’s use cases and obtain an organized and more complete view.

Business Process Model and Notation or shortly BPMN is one of the most well-known standards for business process modeling and management, being of great help in the definition and alignment stages of software products. The goal of BPMN is to provide all the participants of the delivery process, in other words business analysts, development and testing teams and product stakeholders with an easy-to-use and understandable unified set of elements and notations.

A very common challenge in an IT business analyst’s career is represented by the modelling of use cases, of processes, of the domain model and of the interactions among processes, systems and actors, in the projects on which he/she operates. Usually, the textual representation of functional requirements, even if it is correctly structured as epics or user stories, is not enough to understand thoroughly a certain functionality or business process. Then, functional gaps, bottlenecks, erroneous or redundant communications, functional silos or even optimization opportunities become less visible.