The Three Amigos strategy in Agile refers to the three primary perspectives—business, development, and testing—that jointly review work increments during the business, development, and testing phases. For example, business analysts, developers, and testers gather informally in a kickoff meeting to go over each user story, creating a shared and common understanding of what will be delivered, ensuring it reflects the team’s collective voice rather than a single opinion. These three friends not only help prevent dominance by one domain but also facilitate communication across domains, promoting understanding of:
- Collaborative Requirements – What problem are we trying to solve?
- Development Consensus – How will we build a solution to address this problem?
- Acceptance Criteria – What is needed to transition a story into a “Done” state?
From a business perspective, you need to understand the problem you want to solve; from development, you need to know how to build the solution; and from testing, you need to be aware of all aspects that might arise during software delivery. It is also a good practice to review implemented product increments from different perspectives to ensure correctness.
The Roles of the Three Amigos
The goal of the Three Amigos meeting is to bridge the gap in understanding business specifications across the three key roles.
Business Analyst (BA)
The business analyst ensures that everyone on the team shares the same understanding and expectations regarding the user story.
Developer
The developer discusses their understanding of the requirements and what is needed to build the increment.
Since software health is always measured by its quality standards, the quality assurance team details both functional and non-functional aspects of the software increment and outlines the test cases identified for testing the increment.
Tester
The tester and other team members help enrich test cases by identifying edge cases and missing scenarios. They also ensure test cases meet all acceptance criteria.
By sharing different viewpoints on the project, the Three Amigos can raise their concerns and discuss solutions in real time.
Benefits of the Three Amigos Approach
The Three Amigos strategy can have a significant impact on individual and team effectiveness, as well as the quality and maintainability of Scrum projects, enhancing team agility, adaptability, and innovation. Integrating this strategy into the Agile process enables continuous improvement and embraces the core values and principles of the Agile Manifesto, potentially leading to the following benefits:
- Shared and enhanced understanding of the SDLC
- Collaboration in sprint planning and sprint reviews
- Early identification of confusion and misunderstandings, enabling faster delivery
- Ensuring developers, as a team, discuss the required increment of work
- Helping verify acceptance criteria and other attributes
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