Towards identifying challenges in business analysis on IT projects – a practical study

Abstract

The subject matter of this article is business analysis and requirement engineering (BA/RE) in software projects. The goal is to identify the challenges faced by Ukrainian business analysts and requirement engineers in software development projects and investigate the possible reasons and negative consequences of these issues. The tasks to be solved are: create and conduct a survey on the practices of BA/RE in IT projects, define the most critical problems in BA/RE, their causes and implications, and define how project context influences problems in business analysis and requirement engineering. The methods used are: a survey (N = 324) was performed among business analysts and requirement engineers in Ukraine regarding problems in BA/RE and the context of IT projects in which they manifest. The Chi-Square test of independence and Cramer's V effect size measure were applied to define statistically significant dependencies between project context and BA/RE problems. The following results were obtained: the most critical problems in BA/RE, their causes, and their implications were defined and compared with other comprehensive studies. Twelve statistically significant associations for pairs "project context – BA/RE problem" were found (based on the p-value and Cramer's V effect size measure). Conclusion: 1) A comparison of the results of this study with similar studies conducted in other contexts has shown that the issues identified by Ukrainian BA/RE professionals are similar to those found by other researchers in other countries; 2) it is concluded that project context influences particular BA/RE problems, and these dependencies allow us to develop recommendations for risk management for particular problems depending on the project context.