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I was asked by a colleague to identify the top 5 core skills a Requirements Analyst needs to be successful. That’s a pretty basic question, but one that I’d never really given much thought to. I formulated this response, which I think is reasonably accurate:
1. Analytic skills. Ability to synthesize information and work at
differing levels of abstraction.
2. Writing skills. Ability to formulate coherent and concise sentences.
3. Modeling skills. Ability to recognize relationships and
dependencies and model accurately in use case models, business workflows, etc.
4. People skills. Ability to work with and elicit information from
all types of individuals (from executive egos to nerdy
programmers to arrogant architects to blustery business proponents to testy testers).
5. Lifecycle perspective. A firm grasp on where and how requirements
fit into an overall lifecycle, relationship of software development
disciplines and roles, and how requirements are consumed and
transformed/traced into other artifact types.