3 AMIGOS

Is grooming of requirements still a challenge in the team???

“Every Scrum Team Member has his own version of the Requirement understanding!”

3 Amigos Meeting

Collaborating in the Sprint Planning meeting around how the stories fit into the Sprint and what
the Sprint Review will look like from a cohesion perspective.

Chatting when each story is “first picked up” within the Sprint to ensure the team understands
the nuance of the story and how to effectively design and test it.

Definition

Three amigos refers to the primary perspectives to examine an increment of work before,
during, and after development. Those perspectives are:

Business – What problem are we trying to solve?

Development – How might we build a solution to solve that problem?

Testing – What about this, what could possibly happen?

People holding these different perspectives should collaborate to define what to do and agree
on how they know when it is done correctly. The end result of such a collaboration results in a
clearer description of an increment of work often in the form of examples, leading to a shared
understanding for the team.

It’s also good practice for to review increments of the product that have been implemented to
make sure it’s correct from those different perspectives.

The Role of 3 Amigos

The objective of the three Amigo meeting is to bridge down the gaps in the understanding of
the Business Specifications by three Amigos.

Business Analyst: The Business Analyst makes sure that everyone in the team has the same
understanding and expectation from the User Stories.

Developers: The developers discuss their understanding of the requirements and what it takes
to build the Increment.

Since the health of the software is always measured by its high-quality standards, the quality
assurance team elaborates on the functional and non-functional aspects of the software
increment and details out the test cases identified to test the Increment.

Tester: The Test and other team members help in enriching the test cases by finding edge cases
and missing scenarios. They also make sure that all the Acceptance Criteria are met by the test
cases.

By sharing the different perspectives on a project, the Three Amigos can raise their own
concerns and discuss answers in real time.
Benefits of Three Amigo’s Approach:

i) COLLABORATIVE REQUIREMENTS: a common understanding of what needs to be built,

business justification is conveyed for a feature, a project-wide sense of ownership.

ii) COLLABORATIVE TESTS: all teams members contribute to testing the quality of a feature,
business & technical edge cases are identified, testing restrictions are conveyed, test duplication
within the team is reduced.

iii) READY FOR DEV CONSENSUS: Pull vs Push approach - features are pulled into a Sprint when
they have been reviewed and accepted by the 3 Amigos. Features cannot be pushed into a
Sprint – this reduces the risk of the team incorrectly assuming that a feature is ready for dev.