Good outcomes when building software features is strongly connected to having the right insight and information at the right time to help form a consensus on what to actually build. The problem with traditional requirements documents is that they typically don’t achieve this because they are normally written by a single person with a single perspective and often a long time before the actually coding work starts when ideas may have been different.

The idea of the Three Amigos with the agile development world refers to the regular coming together of people from analysis, coding and testing to form a more rounded view of what work to do by using the multiple perspectives of the group. Josh Lynas presented an excellent overview of the technique at a recent Agile Yorkshire event we hosted.