I’ve heard the term three amigos used a lot as a great exercise for team collaboration. It seems that who the amigos are can vary a lot depending on team size to include developers, testers/QA, product owners, designers, etc.
Based on what I read, I have a few questions:
When does your team do their 3 amigos sessions?
Is it always 3 amigos or have you tried more?
How do you integrate this into day to day work? Is there time allowed in the sprint for this or is it structured so that there is a break between sprints to allow for this?
Do you use this approach for all features being developed?
If you can help me with any of the above questions, I’d really appreciate it
In our project, we have sprint planning session at the beginning of a new sprint where do backlog prioritization in the presence of developers, QA Tester ( i.e myself) and Business .
prioritization is done based on business benefit & criticality of the new feature in MVP .
So, we have integrated “Three Amigos” session within our Sprint Planning session.
In Agile process, all the 3 (developers, QA Tester and Business)and more(Product Owners and Stakeholders) work together to beautify the Product outcome.
In planning phase all the 3 amigos + Product Owner takes part to discuss on the requirements. At the end of each Sprint, they give business demo to stakeholders to get the feedback which can improvise the requirements.
Overall entire team works as one team in Agile world.
In past projects, the 3A meeting occurs after the story card is assigned. Typically, the tester, developer, and analyst attend. There is, occasionally, other amigos that join where it makes sense (training a new analyst or tester, perhaps someone providing automation).
The meeting is informal and focused. It is meant to last no more than 15 minutes. When story cards are well written, the meeting goes fast. I work with project managers to raise their awareness on the benefits of 3A meetings. After a few meetings, there is usually benefit demonstrated.
The primary outcome of this meeting is a shared, single understanding of the card. I encourage testers to express their assumptions and interpretations during this meeting.
When I attended a 3A meeting, I’ve been known to throw out some wild interpretations to get the conversation going.
We have usually 4 Amigos: Dev, QA, OPS and PM. If the feature involves more than 1 component there might be more Dev and OPS involved. They were started to get rid of the monthly planning sessions where everyone was present but seldomly needed and turned them into 5-15m sessions for 4-6 people that are actually needed.
Since then they have undergone some big changes. They used to take place in the last week of the sprint and were organised by the Scrum Master. But other people usually knew better who was needed. Changing priorities messed with this system.
Now they just have to take place before a Dev can start to work on an item. They call the meeting at a convenient time for all participants. We have a list of questions that this meeting needs to answer. Any concept has to be approved by all Devs to not miss any possible side effects.
These meetings really helped avoid misunderstanding of what should be done, last minute needs for customer input, less bug found during testing (as edge cases/special behaviors are pointed out to Dev by QA in advance) and better testing (as we know how it’s implemented and everyone can add their ideas).
I consider the Three Amigos a great way to get Test involved in the requirements discussion and discovery.
When getting stories ready for the sprint. Might be when the story is created or as part of a sprint/feature planning. We also do it if the requirements need to change at any point. Such as when the tester and developer went down a different direction and discovered they both made assumptions on what an acceptance criteria would mean. So now it needs to be clarified and all three get together again.
More. You might have multiple customers you can be involved instead of a product owner. An subject matter expert may be involved but is not the developer or product owner. Or someone may be learning the process and so we will have two testers or two product owners.
Currently we have allocated planning time. In the past we had a weekly 30 minute meeting to go through any items in the backlog.
