BA Techniques —Mastering the Three Amigos as a Business Analyst

The Three Amigos is a collaborative backlog refinement technique used in agile product development to refine user stories and ensure that a shared understanding of the stories or requirements exists among the team.

While not an official concept in Agile, The term “Three Amigos” refers to the three Agile roles or capabilities that are involved in the collaboration: the business, development and quality. While participants are not fixed, for us it’s normally:

1. The Product Owner or Business Analyst

2. The Developer

3. The Tester

Of course we don’t always stick to this because sometimes we may need to involve other team members such as UX design, solution architect, etc. We typically meet as required either during the sprint planning session, to review the user stories and ensure clarity across the team. We sometimes also catch up again during the sprint review to ensure that the user stories have been successfully completed, other times it may be during the sprint itself, when more clarity is required.

In case you are wondering, yes, this is pretty much the same thing as story kick-off meetings or the Triad. If you’re doing these already, and its working for your team, then there’s probably no need to get into…