Revisiting the Three Amigos

(first published on October 11th 2013, migrated from my deprecated Wordpress site)

Next week I am speaking at a SIGiST (Specialist Group in Software Testing) event in Melbourne. Having to prepare my presentation has encouraged (OK, forced) me over the past couple of weeks to re-immerse myself in the world of quality, testing and BDD (Behaviour Driven Development).

Despite everything we’ve learned about the value of conversations when deciding what to build into our software — about the value of automating as much of our testing as possible in order to shorten the feedback loops between things breaking and us knowing about them breaking, and to instill confidence among the stakeholders and the team that we can rapidly add new features without breaking existing ones; about the value of taking a test driven approach to building our software, based on real user behaviour rather than code behaviour, to enforce good design practices and ensure the software does what it is supposed to do — I still constantly see and hear of teams struggling with their approach to quality.

Some are struggling to find time to improve due to a combination of legacy systems with brittle or no automated test coverage and looming deadlines for new products or features. Some are struggling to create a short enough feedback loop for testing software increments as they are built so that problems can be addressed before code is deployed, or before developers have moved on to the next or even the next feature.

There is no denying that it is crucial to get the technical practices right from the start. Enough has been written about this. BDD at all layers, continuous integration and automated acceptance and regression tests.

However, when you find yourself in a situation where you are adopting a legacy system or process — i.e. you or your predecessors haven’t got your technical practices right from the start — then your only viable option will usually be to improve things gradually. Have developers learn how to and implement automated acceptance tests. Chuck out and replace flaky record-and-play UI tests with robust unit, integration and browser tests using best-of-breed tools. Embed testers in the development team. Gradually start to do all the things that ideally would have been done from the start.

It seems like a desperate situation, but all is not lost. Far from it. I feel that a common mistake teams and businesses make is to place too much focus too early on the necessary technical improvements.

In my experience, the most important thing to improve is the conversations between the business people, customers and the development team.

One effective technique for doing this is The Three Amigos approach, where the customer / Product Owner / BA has a chat with a developer and tester from the team to agree on the acceptance criteria for a new feature or story before it is undertaken. From this conversation the team can decide exactly what tests are needed, and where they should be implemented, in order to prove that the completed functionality will do what is supposed to do.

A mature Agile team would now write the necessary tests in their tool of choice (e.g. JBehave for Java), the developers would write just enough code for the tests to pass, then refactor. When all the acceptance tests pass, the story is considered “done” from a functional perspective.

But what if the tester and/or developers have little or no experience with an automated testing approach? I have worked with teams in this situation and it cannot be fixed right away (or even at all if there is no willingness from the business to invest in training and slack time to address the problem).

Let’s say the tester is traditional in his approach, and would typically create test cases which he will use to manually test the code when it comes to him from the developer. What tends to happen here is that the developer writes the code for the story, then hands it off to the tester, who then hands it back because the code doesn’t do what the tester expects it to do. This to-ing and fro-ing can happen once, twice, three times. It’s time consuming and frustrating for everyone, and makes it very difficult to complete product increments in a timely fashion.

However, if the tester and the developer have a conversation before the developer starts coding (with the PO/BA in the Three Amigos meeting, or just-in-time in a story kick-off), the tester can take the developer through his test cases (derived from the acceptance criteria) so that the developer understands everything that the tester expects to work when he is handed the code.

Over time in these conversations the developer will start making suggestions, so the test cases become more collaborative and thus effective. He will also want to make sure the story does not bounce back to him from the tester when he’s coded it, so he may do some more manual testing of the functionality or even write some (more) unit tests before handing the story to the tester. His confidence in his code is likely to have improved, and the bounce-backs become the exception rather than the rule.

The key to building in quality is first and foremost in the conversations because they create improvements in the way we work together, whatever situation we are in technically. The good technical practices will emerge from the better conversations. Agile is largely about focusing on technical excellence but, as the first line in the Manifesto tells us, more important is the interactions between the people doing the work. Continuous improvement allows us to start where we are and take one step at a time.

These up front and ongoing conversations, such as the Three Amigos, can have a massive impact on your effectiveness both individually and as a team, and on the quality and maintainability of your product, increasing your agility to adapt and innovate . Adding such conversations to your process is a great sign of continuous improvement and embracing the first and most important line of the Agile Manifesto.

Thanks for reading! If you are looking for help with your software or product delivery, I provide agile coaching, public training (both theory and practical) up to executive management level, and more. As well as public events, I can also run training internally in your organisation for a massively reduced cost, so please ✍ get in touch.