I am "the wall"

As a business analyst, it's my job to ensure that the software that gets developed matches what Product Management expects. Many years of software development experience have made me keenly aware of the misunderstandings that can occur when requirements are "thrown over the wall" from Product Management to the developers. And also when the implementation is "thrown over the wall" from the developers to QA.

In my position as Business Analyst, I am "the wall".

Requirements don't go directly from Product Management to the developers. They go to me first, and I provide the developers with what they need in order to satisfy Product Management's requirements.

And when the development team says that implementation is ready to be tested, I test it before it goes to QA. You'd be surprised how many bugs QA doesn't see because I caught them first. :-)

While this can save QA a lot of time, there are better ways to handle the "throw it over the wall" problem.

Agile software development addresses much of this, as the whole team (Product Management, business analysts, developers, technical writers, QA) works together and really there is no "wall". But that's the subject of another post (yet to be written).