Tell me about one production incident or defect that arose from unclear or incomplete requirements on a past project. How did you technically analyze the root cause and update your BA practices or artifacts to prevent similar issues in that specific environment?

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VirtualInterview.AI · Accepted Answer

On a loan origination platform migration (Salesforce + an in‑house decision engine), we had a nasty production defect where about 2.5% of approved loans weren’t triggering welcome emails or account setup in the downstream system. The requirement just said “send onboarding emails on approval” with no exceptions. In production, we found that approvals coming from a manual override path bypassed the API event that our integration used. I pulled log samples, traced the missing events through Splunk, and paired with the integration engineer to map all approval pathways in a sequence diagram. The root cause was that our requirements and flows only covered the straight‑through process. Afterward, I updated our BA templates to explicitly document alternate flows and system events, added a “non-happy path” checklist to every user story, and worked with QA to design event-based test cases. Similar integration misses dropped to essentially zero in the next two releases.

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