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There are currently several analysis tags which significantly overlap, but some having relatively few questions:

  • Analysis: 80 questions - 8 this year
  • Business-analysis: 26 questions - 2 this year
    • 17 were related to a requirement tag or had requirement in the title
    • 4 more had another analysis or system-analysis tag or referred to SA in the title
  • Systems-analysis: 5 questions - 1 this year
    • 4 had another-analysis or business-analysis tag
    • the last refereed in the title to "software analysis" and in its content to analysis and modeling techniques

Would it be possible to group all the 3 tags under the single more general "analysis" ?

Additional remarks

  • The OOAD tag (object oriented analysis and design) is sufficiently specific and distinguishable from the general analysis tag
  • Other "-analysis" tags are more specific to code, algorithms and performance: algorithm-analysis (96), static-analysis (53), code-analysis (30), and dependency-analysis(13) and do not require action in my opinion.
  • "System analysis" is, despite the word "system" which sounds technical, a discipline that analysis business and business organization as well.
  • "Business analysis" seems frequently used for questions more related to functional requirements or requirement gathering from users. On the other hand, a "requirement" tag is already used very consistently. In this perspective, after the grouping, the combination "analysis" and "requirement", would seem almost equivalent to "business-analysis" and "requirement" IMO.
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  • I need to dig deeper at these, but this seems like a good thing from what I can tell. The only problem is that the only tools are either to do it by hand or do everything at once, so I need to make sure that doing something all at once makes sense.
    – Thomas Owens Mod
    Nov 3, 2016 at 10:30

1 Answer 1

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There are only 7 tags about analysis. As you pointed out, , , and are already well-defined.

Looking at , this could use a little work, too. Some of the questions are really about static analysis. Others are about code quality. Others are about managing source code. There are likely to be better tags than code-analysis. I'm guessing this tag probably isn't even necessary and everything can be retagged.

I'd like to do something with and . Looking at the Wikipedia pages for business analysis and systems analysis, I would favor getting a definition into the systems analysis tag and moving business analysis into it. Based on our scope, I think we're closer to the definition of systems analysis. I don't think we're in a position to help people "determe solutions to business problems" (with the exception of problems related to the processes and methods used to build software), but as software engineers, we do create the systems and procedures that solve business problems. I'd like to hear more feedback from the community before doing this, though.

Once we sort out code-analysis, business-analysis, and systems-analysis, I'd like to take a final pass at since there will probably be better tags at that point.

Status updates:

19 Nov 16: I wrote a tag description for and linked to some resources in the body of the tag wiki. I then went through the 90+ questions and did a cleanup to remove the tag where it wasn't appropriate and do any other cleanup (adding other tags, removing other tags, editing). I also merged business-analysis into systems-analysis. Next steps: (1) review systems-analysis questions (2) review static-analysis questions (3) review dependency analysis questions (4) review code analysis questions (5) review analysis questions

25-Nov-16: I went through the questions. They looked good, but I did some minor edits to a couple of questions for other reasons. I also merged code-analysis into static-analysis as most of the questions were actually about static analysis. This will be the next clean up to make sure it's 100% accurate. I also cleaned up the systems-analysis questions post-merge. Next steps: (1) review static-analysis questions (2) review analysis questions

10-Dec-16: I finished the static-analysis tags. I only have to review analysis questions next - there are 66 questions to review.

12-Dec-16: We're down to less than 20 questions with the analysis tag.

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  • In the view of systemics, a business is just a system like another ;-) Philosophy apart, I agree to merge those two. I went again through all BA: most of them are about business requirements, user stories, use cases. A couple even refer to Business System Analysis. 1 refers to business process but there is a special tag for that. 5 are difficult to reassign as it they explicitly refer to "Business Analyst" as a profession. Any idea how to handle those ?
    – Christophe
    Nov 4, 2016 at 0:02
  • @Christophe I'll take a closer look this weekend. That will give other people a chance to respond as well. It's likely that some may end up being closed. If they have low views, perhaps even deleted. If they have high views, perhaps historically locked. Career stuff is off-topic here, so that's an option.
    – Thomas Owens Mod
    Nov 4, 2016 at 0:04
  • Good idea: would be nice to get some other people expressing their opinion :-) For the profession part it's generally not about carreer advice. it's more about how to integrate them in a team, what are the responisbilities of the ones and of others, etc.. may be a project-management tag then
    – Christophe
    Nov 4, 2016 at 0:07
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    ANy news about that ? I'm not used to the procedures implying meta: shall we just go on with the reassignment or shall we cancel this because of lack of interest ?
    – Christophe
    Nov 13, 2016 at 20:04
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    @Christophe Sorry - I got caught up in a bunch of stuff. This is still on my radar, though.
    – Thomas Owens Mod
    Nov 13, 2016 at 20:40

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