The Three Amigos

This is a useful exercise for backlog refinement.

It’s an opportunity for team members who can comment on testing, development and customer needs to get together, analyse product backlog items and work out things like dependencies, risks, assumptions and size estimates.

It’s technically a meeting to clarify the nature and high-level scope of upcoming work, but with the lens and perspective of three people representing three different priorities of the work.

One person represents the product itself, so that any scope agreed will provide value to the product. They will likely understand organisational priorities, strategic direction and customer preferences. It’s often the Product Owner, or a Product Owner proxy like an analyst.

Another person represents the development effort of the work. They can comment on the technical details of the scope, how it will get built and the amount of graft it will involve. This will likely be one of the developers in the team.

And the third person represents how the work will be tested. How will everyone know that the work adheres to the quality and functionality required to satisfy the end user? This person, normally a tester, will join the meeting to provide their input on what will need to be done to ensure that the work passes all the requirements to be releasable.

The meetings should be focussed on upcoming work, with fast discussions on what needs to be done and how.

Meetings are Expensive

Refining with the whole team is great for collective learning. It helps everyone understand what’s coming up ahead.

However, meetings are expensive, and the collective cost of a meeting using the whole team can get high if it goes on for a long time.

Sometimes the key aspects of the work can be agreed in advance of refining with a much smaller group of people. When the whole team are involved, the discussions can be briefer, and more along the lines of “this is the goal of this work item and these are the details we agreed in an offline discussion earlier.”

Do you use the Three Amigos technique? If you have any experiences, lessons or hints and tips, please share them in the comments below.