UST Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers
Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About UST hiring for Business Analytics roles
UST is a digital transformation and IT services company with large delivery centres in India, particularly in Kerala. It provides software development, testing, cloud, data and AI services for clients in healthcare, retail, banking and semiconductors. It hires in India for software engineers, test engineers, data engineers and analysts.
For Business Analytics roles, this UST practice set focuses most on SQL for Business Analysis (7), Excel for Business Analysts (6), Requirements and Agile (4), UAT and BA Documentation (4). It has 13 easy, 23 medium, 4 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
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01
Split the epic 'Customers can track their order online' into user stories.
Possible stories: As a customer, I want to see my order status (placed, packed, shipped, delivered) so that I know its progress. As a customer, I want an SMS or email when the status changes so that I do not have to check. As a customer, I want the expected delivery date so that I can plan. As a customer, I want a courier tracking link once shipped. As support staff, I want to see the same timeline so that I can answer queries.
02
A business tester raises a defect, and the developer closes it as 'works as designed'. How do you resolve it?
Go back to the requirement and acceptance criteria. If the system matches the agreed requirement, the developer is right, and the business need is a change request. If the requirement is unclear or the design misread it, it is a defect, and the requirement wording should be fixed. Discuss it in triage with both parties, using examples. Either way, close the loop with the tester so they understand the outcome and keep trusting the process.
03
What is the difference between OLTP and OLAP systems?
A business case justifies why an organisation should invest in a project. It usually contains the problem or opportunity, objectives and success measures, options considered including do nothing, costs and benefits of each option with a financial evaluation such as NPV and payback, risks and assumptions, impact on people and processes, a recommended option and an implementation timeline. A BA often builds it with finance, and it becomes the baseline for checking benefits after delivery.
DMN (Decision Model and Notation) is an OMG standard for modelling business decisions, mainly through decision tables that list input conditions, outputs and a hit policy. BPMN shows the flow of work, while DMN holds the decision logic. Instead of drawing ten nested gateways for loan eligibility, you place one business rule task in BPMN that calls a DMN table. This keeps diagrams clean and lets business users change rules without redrawing the process.
06
What is AS-IS and TO-BE process modelling, and where does BPMN fit in?
AS-IS modelling documents how a process works today, including pain points, delays and handoffs. TO-BE modelling shows the improved future process after changes or a new system. Comparing the two reveals the gaps and requirements. BPMN, Business Process Model and Notation, is the standard notation, using events, tasks, gateways for decisions and swimlanes for roles, so both business and IT read the diagrams the same way.
A use case describes the full interaction between an actor and the system (main and alternate flows). A user story is a short statement of need from the user's point of view, refined with acceptance criteria.
About 20 million people, roughly 10% order pizza on a weekend, about 1 pizza per 2 people in an order. This gives roughly 1 million pizzas, adjusted for outlets and delivery capacity.
The cash conversion cycle measures how many days cash is tied up in operations. It equals days inventory outstanding plus days sales outstanding minus days payables outstanding. Example: inventory sits 40 days, customers pay in 30 days and suppliers are paid in 45 days, so the cycle is 40 + 30 - 45 = 25 days. A shorter cycle means less working capital is needed. Some marketplaces have a negative cycle because they collect from customers before paying sellers.
13
What is the difference between churn rate and retention rate?
Churn rate is the percentage of customers who leave in a period: customers lost divided by customers at the start. Retention rate is the percentage who stay, roughly 100 minus churn for the same cohort. If you start a month with 1,000 subscribers and 50 cancel, churn is 5 percent and retention 95 percent. Count new customers separately, otherwise growth hides churn. Revenue churn can differ from customer churn.
14
Guesstimate: how many smartphones are sold in India each year?
Use a replacement plus new-buyer approach. India has about 144 crore people; assume around 60 crore active smartphone users. If people replace phones every 4 years on average, replacements are about 15 crore a year. Add first-time buyers, say 2 to 3 percent of the remaining adult population, roughly 1.5 crore. The estimate is about 16 to 17 crore phones a year, which is close to reported industry numbers of around 15 crore.
15
How do you calculate the percentage contribution of each category?
Alpha testing is done internally, by employees or a selected group, in a controlled environment before the product is released to outsiders, and aims to catch major issues early. Beta testing releases the product to a limited group of real external users in real conditions to gather feedback on usability, performance and missing features before general release. For a mobile app, beta often uses store testing tracks, and feedback is fed into the final release backlog.
17
How would you forecast next quarter's sales in Excel?
Working capital is current assets minus current liabilities, mainly receivables plus inventory minus payables. It is the money tied up in running daily operations. Too little means the company may struggle to pay suppliers and salaries; too much means cash is locked in slow inventory or unpaid customer invoices. Analysts track it because a growing business often needs more working capital, so fast growth can create cash shortages even when the business is profitable.
19
What is the difference between UNION and UNION ALL?
Both stack the results of two queries with the same number and type of columns. UNION removes duplicate rows, which needs a sort or hash step and is slower. UNION ALL keeps every row and is faster. Use UNION ALL when combining data such as online and store sales where duplicates are genuine or impossible, and UNION only when you specifically need a distinct list, such as unique customer IDs from two sources.
A self join joins a table to itself using two aliases, so you can compare rows within the same table. A classic business example is an employees table with a manager_id column: joining employees e to employees m on e.manager_id = m.employee_id lists each employee with their manager's name. Another example is finding customers who placed two orders on the same day by joining orders to orders on customer_id and date with different order IDs.
21
You receive two customer lists from sales and billing and must reconcile them. How do you do it?
Standardise both first: trim spaces, fix case, convert IDs to the same type and remove duplicates. Use a unique key like customer ID, or a combined key of phone and email if IDs differ. Then use XLOOKUP or COUNTIFS to mark each record as matched, only in sales or only in billing, or a Power Query merge with anti joins. Summarise mismatches by type and share the exception list with both owners.
22
Write an Excel formula to count the number of unique customers in a column.
// Excel 365
=COUNTA(UNIQUE(A2:A500))
// unique customers in the North region only
=COUNTA(UNIQUE(FILTER(A2:A500, B2:B500="North")))
// older versions (no blanks in range)
=SUMPRODUCT(1/COUNTIF(A2:A500, A2:A500))
23
What is the difference between a process, a procedure and a work instruction?
A process describes what happens end to end to achieve an outcome, across roles, such as customer onboarding. A procedure describes how one part of that process is carried out and who is responsible, such as the KYC verification procedure. A work instruction is the most detailed, step-by-step guide for a single task, often with screenshots, such as how to upload a document in the CRM. BAs usually model processes and reference the other two.
24
What is a data dictionary and why does a business analyst maintain one?
A data dictionary is a catalogue of data elements used in a system or report: field name, business definition, data type, length, allowed values, mandatory or optional, source system, owner and example values. A BA maintains it so business users, developers and testers use one definition, for example what counts as an active customer. It prevents mapping errors in integrations and migrations, speeds up testing and reduces disputes about why reports do not match.
Link your answer to real experience. For example: during my internship I noticed reports were rebuilt manually every week, so I mapped the process and automated it with Power Query, saving the team a day each week. I enjoyed understanding the problem, talking to users and seeing the result used. A BA role combines that problem solving, communication and data work, which is where my strengths are, and I want to build deeper domain knowledge.
26
What is the difference between XLOOKUP and INDEX-MATCH?
UAT sign-off is the formal acceptance by the business that the solution meets agreed requirements and is fit to go live, often with a list of known open defects and agreed workarounds. It should be given by the accountable business owner or product owner, not by the IT team or the BA. The BA prepares the evidence: test execution summary, defect status and traceability to requirements. Sign-off is recorded in writing, usually by email or in the test management tool.
Power Query is the data preparation engine inside Power BI and Excel. It connects to sources like Excel, CSV, SQL databases and web APIs, then lets you clean and shape data with recorded steps: remove columns, change types, split, merge, unpivot, append and group. Each step is written in the M language and replays on every refresh, so a monthly cleanup job becomes repeatable instead of manual.
29
What is incremental refresh and when do you need it?
Incremental refresh partitions a large table by date so each refresh reloads only recent data, such as the last 10 days, while older partitions stay stored. You define RangeStart and RangeEnd parameters in Power Query, filter the date column with them, and set the policy for how much history to keep. It is needed when full refreshes of millions of rows take too long or fail, and it reduces load on the source system.
30
What is an event-based gateway and when would you use it?
An event-based gateway is a decision point where the path is chosen by whichever event happens first, not by a data condition. It is followed by intermediate catching events such as a message or a timer. Example: after sending a quotation, either the customer's acceptance message arrives, or a 7-day timer fires and a reminder is sent. It models real waiting situations that an exclusive gateway cannot express correctly.
31
What is the hierarchy of epic, feature and user story in Agile?
An epic is a large body of work that delivers a major business goal and spans several sprints, such as 'Online loan application'. It is broken into features or capabilities, such as 'Document upload'. Each feature is split into user stories small enough to finish in one sprint, such as 'As an applicant, I want to upload my PAN card photo so that I do not need to visit a branch'.
32
A hospital chain's average patient waiting time has risen from 30 to 50 minutes. How would you approach the case?
Clarify where the wait is measured: registration, consultation, diagnostics or billing. Split the problem into demand and capacity. On demand, check patient volume, peak-hour mix, walk-ins versus appointments and new departments. On capacity, check doctor availability, no-shows of staff, consultation time per patient and process bottlenecks such as manual billing. Identify the biggest stage and suggest fixes like slot-based appointments, triage and digital billing.
33
What is user activation and what is an 'aha moment'?
Activation is the point at which a new user first experiences the product's core value, such as completing a first lesson, sending a first payment or creating a first project. The aha moment is the specific early action that strongly predicts long-term retention, found by comparing retained and churned users. Teams then design onboarding to get more new users to that action quickly and track the activation rate.
34
Guesstimate: how many laptops are sold in India each year?
Segment by buyer. Households: about 30 crore households, roughly 15 percent own a laptop, so 4.5 crore laptops, replaced every 5 years, gives about 90 lakh a year, plus around 20 lakh first-time student buyers. Businesses: assume 4 crore office workers using laptops, replaced every 4 years, giving 1 crore. Government and education schemes add around 10 lakh. Total is about 2.2 crore. Sanity check against industry trends and give a range of 1.5 to 2.5 crore.
35
Write a SQL query to list customers who have never placed an order.
SELECT c.customer_id, c.name
FROM customers c
LEFT JOIN orders o ON o.customer_id = c.customer_id
WHERE o.order_id IS NULL;
-- alternative
SELECT customer_id, name FROM customers c
WHERE NOT EXISTS (
SELECT 1 FROM orders o WHERE o.customer_id = c.customer_id
);
36
What are LOD expressions in Tableau and how do FIXED, INCLUDE and EXCLUDE differ?
Level of Detail expressions compute an aggregate at a granularity different from the view. FIXED computes at the stated dimensions regardless of the view, for example { FIXED [Customer ID] : MIN([Order Date]) } for first purchase date. INCLUDE adds a dimension to the view level, useful for average sales per customer by region. EXCLUDE removes a dimension, useful for comparing each month with the yearly total. FIXED ignores normal dimension filters unless they are context filters.
37
What are the three main financial statements and how are they linked?
The income statement shows revenue, expenses and profit over a period. The balance sheet shows assets, liabilities and equity at a point in time. The cash flow statement shows cash from operating, investing and financing activities. They link together: net profit flows into retained earnings on the balance sheet and is the starting point of operating cash flow, and the closing cash balance from the cash flow statement equals cash on the balance sheet.
38
What Power Query steps would you use to clean a messy monthly sales file?
Promote the first row to headers and remove blank or total rows. Set correct data types for dates and amounts, and use locale settings for Indian date formats. Trim and clean text columns, replace errors and nulls, split combined fields like 'City-State', and unpivot month columns into rows. Remove duplicates on the order ID, then merge with the product master. Rename steps clearly so others can follow the logic.
39
How do you analyse variance between budget and actual?
Use historical data with FORECAST.ETS or trend lines, state assumptions, compare against actuals and show best, base and worst scenarios.
Tips to crack the UST Business Analytics interview
Practise aptitude and coding questions for the assessment, focusing on accuracy within time limits.
Revise SQL, testing concepts and your main programming language, and prepare examples from your projects.
Learn about UST's history as UST Global and its large Thiruvananthapuram campus for company questions.
Keep a one-minute story ready for every project on your CV: problem, your part, tools, result.
Practise the hard questions on this page aloud; UST interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the UST Business Analytics interview?
Candidates usually go through 4 stages: Online assessment (aptitude + reasoning); Coding test; Technical interview; HR round. The exact rounds change with the role, team, location and your experience, so confirm the process with the recruiter.
Which topics should I prepare for the UST Business Analytics interview?
This practice set leans on SQL for Business Analysis (7), Excel for Business Analysts (6), Requirements and Agile (4), UAT and BA Documentation (4). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most UST interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at UST?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in it services interviews like UST's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does UST hire Business Analytics professionals in India?
UST has large teams in Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad. Openings and locations change often, so check the UST careers page and filter by city and experience.
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