A beginner’s Business Analysis glossary

Plain-language meanings of the terms you will meet while learning business analysis. Come back to this page whenever a word feels unfamiliar.

Stakeholder: Anyone who is affected by, or has an interest in, a project or process — for example users, managers, customers or the IT team.
Requirement: A clear statement of something a business needs a process or system to do or to be.
Functional requirement: What the system must do. Example: “The system shall let an employee submit a leave request.”
Non-functional requirement: How well the system must do it — speed, security, ease of use, availability. Example: “The page must load within 3 seconds.”
Business Requirements Document (BRD): A document that records the business problem, goals, scope and requirements in plain language.
Scope: What a project will include — and what it will not. Clear scope avoids confusion later.
Business process: A series of steps people follow to get a piece of work done, such as handling an order or approving leave.
Bottleneck: The step in a process where work waits the longest and slows everything down.
As-is process: How a process works today.
To-be process: How the process should work after improvement.
Process map / flowchart: A diagram that shows the steps of a process using boxes and arrows.
Swimlane diagram: A flowchart divided into lanes, one for each person or team, to show who does what.
User story: A short description of a need from the user’s view: “As a [who], I want [what], so that [why].”
Acceptance criteria: Clear conditions that must be true for a requirement or user story to be considered done.
Use case: A description of how a user interacts with a system to reach a goal, step by step.
Assumption: Something we believe to be true but have not confirmed.
Constraint: A limit the project must work within, such as budget, time, law or technology.
Risk: Something that might go wrong and affect the project, with a chance and an impact.
Open question: A question that still needs an answer before a decision can be made.
Prioritisation: Deciding which requirements matter most. A common method is Must / Should / Could / Won’t.
ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning — software that runs core business functions such as finance, sales, purchase and inventory in one connected system.
MIS: Management Information System — reports and data that help managers make decisions.
Test case: A set of steps, with the expected result, used to check that something works as required.
Defect (bug): A difference between what the system does and what it was required to do.
UAT: User Acceptance Testing — final testing by the business users to confirm the system meets their needs.
KPI: Key Performance Indicator — a number used to measure how well something is performing, such as “orders delivered within 2 days”.
Traceability: Being able to link a requirement to its test cases, so you can show every requirement has been checked.

← Process exercise Next: Sample requirements document →

Original educational material created by Bigsun Technologies for the Bigsun Udaan initiative. The people, companies and figures in the examples are fictional. This is a learning aid, not an accredited course or a guarantee of employment.