Getting the right context –

What is Three Amigos?

The Three Amigos is a Agile collaboration practice used to elaborate stories with the right capabilities and perspectives to prepare stories.

It requires the collaboration of the usually the perspectives of;

  • Business (represented by the Product owner or Business Analyst or SME)
  • Development
  • Quality Engineering (Tester)

What Three Amigos is not

The 3 Amigos is not backlog refinement so, don’t get confused by it. Both Agile practices are about story elaboration to figure out what to develop and build.  Backlog refinement involves the whole team and doesn’t generate any testing scenarios or clear elicitation. Despite all the discussions that occur during backlog refinement and sprint planning, it’s still possible to have a fuzzy understanding of what is to be built afterward. The Three Amigos is a much smaller group with different perspectives and is done as required, and generally has test scenarios as an output.

Who attends a Three Amigos?

The “Three” in Three Amigos refers to these three roles:

  • the Product Owner or Business Analyst or SME
  • the Coder (Developer)
  • a Tester (Quality Engineer)

It’s not just the number of people involved. Sometimes it’s Four Amigos or more Amigos when other members are needed like a User Experience or Subject Matter Expertise (ie; business, legal, media comms, creative producer, producer). The roles may be different depending on the work type for your Agile team.

Benefits of the Three Amigos?

A Three Amigos results in :

  • clear understanding of what needs to be delivered, and how it intended to work
  • identify any misunderstandings, assumptions and confusion before work begins
  • clear acceptance criteria’s
  • documented test scenarios that verify the code works as intended
  • shorten the feedback loops between Product Owner, BA, SME, Developer and Tester
  • provide developers more visibility into what they’ll be to developing and any difficult challenges

When to do it?

Three Amigos should happen as soon as the developer picks up a story from the sprint backlog (current sprint). The timing is a key element in ensuring the Three Amigos’ works well. If your work type doesn’t lend its self to do so ie; Video production or marketing campaign – this can be done the sprint before.

What works for us?

We have adapted this Agile practice to suit our the needs for some of our teams. For our teams, the Three Amigos:

  • is an informal conversation than a time boxed meeting
  • is sometimes a Two Amigos, Four or Five Amigos
  • is done on demand, reducing the overheads of more meetings
  • more opportunity to brainstorming to flesh out test scenarios and the acceptance criteria’s
  • it sometimes it evolves into a much deeper conversations, uncovering more issues that become new topics or carving out new stories

Give it a try and post in the comments section on how it is working for you.

Vagile

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