This is exactly my job, that of a 'Business Systems Analyst' at a big insurance company. I spend most of my time refining requirements with business stakeholders until I can document a set of atomic tasks. This documentation, generally referred to as a 'Business Requirements Specification' gets passed along to the developer who then writes a 'Technical Specification' detailing the implementation of each business requirement. One of my primary goals is to remove any guesswork or questions from the developers scope, such that they can focus clearly on the implementation of the solution. In all of the enterprise level development jobs I've worked, the developer is not expected to interact with the business at all. The overhead for simple development sky rockets, but that's a reasonable trade off to meet regulatory requirements such as Sarbannes Oxley, etc.
A BA is one of those jobs I'd always thought would suit me until, in a previous life, I spent a few years working as a developer for Big Co. there we had a whole team of BAs and god were they hopeless. One of the worst things to happen to the development process.
the idea seemed to be that programmers are code monkeys; don't let them think, lets define exactly what they need to produce and get them to do exactly that. Then get a team of people to act as intermediaries between the business and the devs.
Geat idea except for: the BAs were passionless and didn't give a damn about anything other than getting the job 'done'. They didn't really understand the business at all. Most (almost all) of the many reams of documentation they produced was useless. They had no programming background, and no ability to anticipate edge cases, missing cases or anything really.
Sorry, but my limited exposure to business analysts has left me with not much more than a mix of contempt/ambivalence for the role.
