How a functional analyst transforms requirements into solutions

September 25, 2025

Software development is a highly disruptive process that involves balancing businesses and stakeholders from various contexts, each with different capacities, expectations, and perspectives. Naturally, this diversity can create challenges in defining objectives and how they should be achieved.

Take, for example, a healthcare organization manager who acts as an intermediary in the development project of a digital platform for patient mobility. In a requirements-gathering workshop, the manager prioritizes implementing the telemedicine feature. However, the programmer points out that this feature will require significant development time.

This leads to a deadlock. To ensure a balanced and viable decision, it is essential to have a professional who can bridge the gap between the technological aspect, the business, and the people. This professional is the Functional Analyst.

The Functional Analyst is responsible for analyzing the problem or business opportunity that initiated the project, defining the best methodology for requirements gathering, mediating with stakeholders, and supporting software development. This work should result in clear and objective functional documentation, ensuring that the platform’s specification is understandable for all involved and represents an aligned vision of the project.

What are functional and non-functional requirements

A requirement represents an identified need. In the context of software development, requirements are divided into functional and non-functional, addressing what the system should do, how it should behave and the rules, constraints, and characteristics it must meet.

Following the SMART standard, requirements should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, which are essential criteria for ensuring their successful implementation.

A functional requirement defines what the platform should accomplish:

Non-functional requirements, on the other hand, are related to how the platform functions, involving aspects like security and performance, and can be represented as follows:

The process of transforming requirements into solutions

As described earlier, requirements gathering is a crucial process for extracting ideas, identifying objectives, and understanding challenges specific to different business areas. For this, the Functional Analyst must define the appropriate strategy and apply effective requirements-gathering methodologies.

Techniques used include:

• - BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation) mapping for analyzing the current (as-is) and future (to-be) states;
• - Gap analysis supported by BPMN;
• - Focus groups, workshops, and interviews with stakeholders.

After gathering the requirements, they are formalized into a Functional Analysis Document (FAD), which includes metadata such as ID, associated business requirements and priority. The final validation of the document by the participants ensures its suitability for the project.

Tools and methods used by functional analysts

The FAD contains detailed specifications of the platform, presented clearly for programmers and stakeholders. In addition to business and functional requirements, the document includes use cases, which describe the user’s interaction with the system to achieve a specific goal.

Example of a use case:

Additionally, the Functional Analyst may present BPMN diagrams of the processes, state diagrams, user profiles, platform wireframes, notification texts to be sent, and permission matrices for each user profile.

Challenges in translating needs into technological solutions

One of the main challenges faced by Functional Analysts is changes to requirements throughout the project. These may arise due to new constraints or the evolution of business needs. In such situations, it is the Functional Analyst’s role to assess the feasibility of implementing the requirement, considering deadlines, budget, and technical complexity. Thus, balancing customer expectations with the project’s capabilities is necessary, which can be difficult due to the customer’s resistance to existing limitations.

Another challenge is the connection between programmers and the functional specification. Due to the extensive nature of the documentation, programmers, who often have a high number of tasks to manage, frequently turn to the Functional Analyst for direct clarification. Depending on the size of the team and the division of responsibilities, this can increase the analyst’s workload, especially in Agile environments, where deliveries are rapid and continuous. The key to mitigating this overload lies in optimizing communication and aligning expectations, enabling more efficient collaboration without compromising the quality of work.