An analyst needs the following knowledge, skills, and abilities:

• Expertise in identifying and understanding problems and opportunities
• Ability to articulate the needs that are associated with the key problem to be solved or opportunity to be realized
• Ability to collaborate effectively with the extended team through collaborative working sessions, workshops, JAD sessions and other techniques.
• Good communication skills, verbally and in writing
• Knowledge of the business and technology domains or the ability to quickly absorb and understand such information

This role can be assigned in the following ways:

• On small, agile teams this role is often shared among several team members that also perform other roles.
• One (or more) team member(s) performs this role exclusively. This commonly adopted approach is suitable for complex requirements that are difficult to gather.
• One staff (or more) team member(s) performs both this role and the Tester role. This is a good option for smaller or resource-constrained test teams.