The Three Amigos
Also known as:
Story Kick Offs
Story Huddles
The Triad
Key Concepts:
Just In Time - Deferring discussions to the last responsible moment
Creating new knowledge
Reducing written specifications and upfront documentation generation
The three amigos is the term used to describe three people, in different roles that will bring different considerations to an activity to scrutinise 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.
There are risks / down sides to this approach, typically related to too few people having this shared understanding. It's often best used just before and during the development of this piece of work only as a Just-In-Time approach.
Whilst this practice can be used outside of any particular agile framework or testing practices, the Three Amigos is a common practice as part of BDD (Behaviour-Driven Development*), an Agile software development methodology in which an application is documented and designed around the behaviour a user expects to experience when interacting with it.
*BDD allows you to clearly communicate requirements so there's less rework due to misinterpreted requirements and acceptance criteria. It focusses on User Needs.