Quagmire,

I have been a consulting BA for several years. Roles of a BA has not yet been that clearly defined, and can vary from company to company. QA and BA roles are somewhat interchangable for a lot of companies. Depending on the size of the project, sometimes BAs also required to do some QA and testing work. More often than not, BA requires more communications/interpersonal skills than QA; you must be able to run meetings and requirement gathering sessions. You also have to author a lot of documents that focus on managing and communicating requirements. You don't need a lot of technical expertise for a BA role, but you absolutely need to understand the software development lifecycle, and the different development methodologies used. There are a lot of buzz words and terms in the industry these days that you should be familiar with, Waterfall, RUP, Agile development, usecases etc etc. In most cases one is able to quickly learn the process at work, but you cannot be clueless if it comes up in the interview.

I highly recommend you visit http://www.theiiba.org/am/ and possibly be a member if you are serious about making a BA career. Once you are a member you will get what is called a BA Book of Knowledge, a.k.a BABOK in the BA community. This is an extremely helpfull manual for BAs.

Good Luck!!