Three Amigos | Glossary

Definition

Three amigos refers to the primary perspectives to examine 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.  The end result of such a collaboration results in a clearer description of an increment of work often in the form of examples, leading to a shared understanding for the team.

It’s also good practice for people They should also review increments of the product that have been implemented to make sure it’s correct from those different perspectives.

The concept of three amigos intends to balance between no collaboration between people with different perspectives and involving an entire team in discussing all the details of every increment of work.

Disaggregation | Glossary

Definition:

Disaggregation is a process of splitting a user story  or feature into smaller, easier-to-estimate pieces, in order to ensure an effective delivery of a product and reduce the complexity. Smaller stories allow faster, more reliable implementation, since small things go through a system faster, reducing variability and managing risk. Splitting bigger stories into smaller ones is, thus, a mandatory survival skill for every Agile team. It’s both the art and the science of incremental development.

Agile teams use story points and ‘estimating poker’ to value their work [2, 3]. A story point is a singular number that represents a combination of qualities:

Agile teams often use ‘estimating poker,’ which combines expert opinion, analogy, and disaggregation to create quick but reliable estimates. Disaggregation refers to splitting a story or features into smaller, easier to estimate pieces.

Further Reading:

Lean from the Trenches: Managing large scale projects with Kanban by Henrick Kniberg