User Stories with JIRA: Hand-On Workshop for IT Business Analysts in Agile

This is a 2-day online instructor-led training:

Day 1 - Wednesday, June 26, 2024:

• 11 AM – 1:30 PM EST | 5:00 PM – 7:30 PM CET (2.5 hrs)

Day 2 - Thursday, June 27, 2024:

• 11 AM – 1:30 PM EST | 5:00 PM – 7:30 PM CET (2.5 hrs)

User stories are an excellent choice for capturing requirements for modern-day digital products! The main reason they are so popular is that user stories are very business- and end-user-friendly. They prompt us to focus first on user needs, wants, and desires, which makes total sense when building user-centric products.

However, it's hard to believe that in 2024, in the era of distributed multinational Agile teams, many people still conceive of user stories as nothing more than a sticky note with a brief sentence written by an end-user. How can you implement a testable, shippable software product this way? It’s no surprise that software development teams require more detailed, elaborated, and thoroughly thought-out user stories to build next-generation digital products. And that’s exactly what this class is about!

Training Overview
In this live, instructor-led training class, we’ll not only learn what makes a great user story but also see how to build a fully-sized product backlog using the #1 tool for Agile Teams—Atlassian JIRA.

This class will be super hands-on, and you will prepare development-ready user stories for a Scrum team directly in JIRA. With the power of AI, I’ll teach you how to do it quickly and significantly improve the value delivered by you and your Agile team.

What You Will Learn

1. Introduction to Business Analysis in the Agile Framework
2. Scrum Practices: Understanding Roles, Events, and Artifacts
3. Fundamentals of User Stories: Defining Their Role and Importance in Agile
4. Writing Effective User Stories: From INVEST to Gherkin
5. Role of Definition of Ready (DoR) and Definition of Done (DoD) in User Stories
6. Types of User Stories and Story Points: Understanding Different Scenarios and Estimation Techniques
7. Building and Managing Product Backlogs in JIRA—Creating User Stories and Epics
8. Practical Use of JIRA for Agile Teams: Board Configuration, Scrum and Kanban setups
9. Advanced JIRA Techniques: Leveraging Automation, Filters, Dashboards, and JIRA Query Language (JQL)
10. Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and Acceptance Criteria: Ensuring Quality and Testability
11. Prioritization and Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Techniques for Effective Agile Planning
12. User Story Review Lifecycle. Review and Feedback Mechanisms: Utilizing Comments, Collaboration, and Confluence alongside JIRA
13. Agile Documentation: Confluence as a Tool for Maintaining Project and Team Knowledge

Who Should Attend?

• IT Business Analysts
• IT Product Owners
• IT Project Managers
• IT Solution Architects

Concerned that you’re new to Agile and may not handle the tasks? Or perhaps you think you’re overqualified? No need to worry; individual exercises will be assigned to you based on your current level, from novice to expert.

Here’s how it’s going to work.

1. A week prior to the training

You will receive an email with specific details about the upcoming training, including:

• Your personal login information for access to the JIRA project managed by BACareerMentor. You and other participants will use this during the training.
• A welcome video from your instructor, Sergey Shimansky, CBAP, walking you through the registration in the Jira course project.
• A questionnaire to assess your current level of experience with user stories, Jira, and the Agile project framework. This information will be used to assign exercises that fit your skill level.
• The link to the private Zoom call that will be used during the training.

2. During the Training

You will work individually and in small groups with other participants, producing user stories in JIRA.

• We will do this using a real-world training project: an e-commerce website implementation for a fashion company in an Agile environment. Each participant will be assigned a specific functional area/epics, and the complexity of the exercises will be based on prior assessment.
• As we work on the training project, we’ll take pauses to learn some theory and the science behind core Scrum principles and elements, such as Story Points, Definition of Ready, and Scrum Events.
• The course is organized over two days to accommodate your busy schedule—during evening time in Europe and lunchtime in the U.S.

3. Post-Training Benefits

To help you further implement your new skills and knowledge, the day after the training you will receive:

• A Certificate of Course Completion issued by BACareerMentor.com—use it to demonstrate your newly acquired skills to your colleagues and leaders.
• An invitation to a free, complimentary 1-on-1 Agile coaching session.
• A copy of the hand-out course workbook with 10+ exercises used at the training.
• Access to the Jira project for the entire week, use it as a playground to harden your newly acquired skills!

What’s Included?

• 10 intensive hands-on exercises with direct access to a live JIRA environment.
• Full emulation of an Agile team's work on an e-commerce project.
• Certificate of completion.
• Complimentary individual 15-minute Q&A session with the instructor.
• Full money-back guarantee and a flexible cancellation policy.
• BONUS: Free lifetime access to a 3-in-1 Discovery Mastermind educational package ($79 value!)

Meet Your Instructor!

Sergey Shimansky is an accomplished IT leader, business analyst, and product owner with over 20 years of experience. As the founder of BACareerMentor.com, Sergey is dedicated to helping aspiring business analysts and product owners accelerate their careers and navigate their professional journeys.

Currently serving as Head of Experience Consulting and Business Analysis at a global leader in service development, digital platform engineering, and digital product design, Sergey has a proven track record of building new digital products. He has led numerous e-commerce and content management projects for Fortune 500 organizations across the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union.

Sergey specializes in project discovery workshops with a focus on e-commerce, content strategy and customer journeys, multi-national content catalog structure, content publishing workflows, content components, content taxonomy and metadata, wireframes and UI interfaces, digital asset management, translation and localization, personalization.

Sergey is a Certified Business Analyst Professional (CBAP®), Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO I), and Scaled Agile Professional (SAFe® Agilist).