Clean Language originated within the discipline of therapy and focuses on understanding other people’s personal metaphors. It can help business analysts to form better questions and prevent inadvertently leading or pre-supposing a solution.

Tacit knowledge includes the knowledge that business stakeholders possess that isn’t codified or written down anywhere—and information they don’t even know they possess. The challenge for business analysts is that it is essential to get at this type of information in order to write requirements.

Among business analysts, there is often a real reluctance to model data as it is seen as a technical activity rather than a business-focused activity. Adrian Reed explains why data models are important, and how they can help map out and understand the problem domain to avoid misunderstandings.