The 3 Amigos is a method where Dev, BA and QA Come Together!
Did you know?
Amigos is a word mainly used in Spanish speaking areas and is used to address or refer to a Friend. So is the friendly concept of The 3 Amigos in Agile with multiple benefits!
Three amigos refers to the primary perspectives to examine an increment of work before, during, and after development. Those perspectives are:
- Business Analyst – What problem are we trying to solve?
The Business Analyst makes sure that everyone in the team has the same understanding and expectation from the User Stories. - Developer – How might we build a solution to solve that problem?
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. - Test Analyst/Quality Analyst/Software Tester – What about this, what could possibly happen
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.
There are many ways to organize these meetings, and sometimes more than three people participate. The more perspectives in the meeting, the more gaps the organization can fill.
The 3 Amigos helps communication between the disciplines and promotes understanding of:
- Collaborative Requirements – What problem are we trying to solve
- Ready for Development Consensus – How might we build a solution to solve that problem
- Acceptance for Definition of Done – What is needed to get the story into “Done”
Failure to conduct the Three Amigos meeting in Agile could cause each team member to have mixed or different perceptions of the project at hand. This is why the business analyst, developer and QA must collaborate and examine the product development through the lens of what’s important to their customers and business.
Benefits of Three Amigo’s Approach
The 3 Amigos’ Strategy can have a massive impact on the effectiveness both individually and as a team, and on the quality and maintainability of your Scrum projects, increasing your team’s agility, adaptability and innovation. Embedding such strategy into your agile process leads to continuous improvement and embracing the most important values and principles of the Agile Manifesto and likely yields the following benefits.
- Sharing and building an understanding of the SDLC
- Collaboration in sprint meetings and sprint reviews
- Identifies confusion and misunderstandings early, allowing for faster delivery
- Ensures developers, as a team, discuss the increment of work needed
- Helps go over the acceptance criteria and other attributes
