NIX Solutions’ specialists at 6th International IT Analyst Conference, Moscow

At the end of April, the Sixth International Conference on System and Business Analysis was held. On the morning of the 21st of April, NIX Solutions experts walked along the Moskva River to the conference venue.

Analyst Days is famous for its wide range of lectures on system and business analysis. We have been attending this conference for more many years now. The main topics of this year were Agile development and Testing requirements—the organizers shared their reports mainly on these topics. Four streams worked simultaneously at the event: three reports streams and a workshop section, organized by BarCamp.

The most memorable reports of the first day were:

• “Requirements: from chaos to FIFO” – Andrew Pavlov, team lead of QA department at T-Systems, St. Petersburg, shared an interesting approach to work with ASAP requirements—the escalation queue, which still allows the client to make a special query.

• “Analysts from Mars, users from Venus” – Andrey Kazakov, head of the analyst’s group in Rostelecom-Integration Ltd, Moscow, described how they had identified exactly those users who will provide really useful information for further work.

Among all of the speakers, Sergey Shimansky (EPAM Systems, Minsk) impressed me with his thoughtful presentation and incomparable style of speech.

Elena, Business Analyst, NIX Solutions

The music group from Mordovia finished the evening, performing their songs on Erzya language.

On the second day, the reports mainly concerned issues of improving the effectiveness of analysts. I underlined a Georgiy Savelyev (Luxoft, Moscow) report—“How to improve the productivity of business analysis with the Lean manufacturing methods.”

The best report of Analyst Days 2017 was an expressive “Modelling is the Simplest Thing.” The representative of UML2.ru community, Grigoriy Pechenkin collected 12 basic elements with a detailed description of this approach on his website.

There were reports, explaining well-known techniques, but without much new information for me. I liked the reports “Testing the requirements. Find problems beforehand” and “Design Thinking for analysts,” where the author considered the way from task (issue) to creating a solution.

I noted Sergey Krupenin’s lection “PM vs BA vs World. How people behave, who you set objectives + Management duels. Raw practice,” where he taught how a leader should behave with team members of different characters and personalities. In the end, we conducted a “duel” between a project manager and a team lead. I also visited several BDD reports where the speaker talked about the advantages of this approach.

A workshop was held—“Concise But Serious: Describing the Right Solution”—where we had to create a product, describe our target audience, distinguish main functions, determine problems, and identify possible risks. During this creative task, a group of business analysts found answers to all of these questions.

Aleksandra, Business Analyst, NIX Solutions

After each report, we could gift a sticker to the speaker. At the end of the second day, the organizers presented gifts to the best speakers of the conference:

1st place – iPhone 7

2nd place – Xbox

3rd place – Gyroscooter

Good motivation for going to the conference as a speaker next year!

After the conference, we walked to Red Square. The next day we went home to start applying our gained experience.

Author of the article Anastasia, Business Analyst, NIX Solutions