3C’s is an Effective User Story technique. 3Cs: Card, Conversation, and Confirmation.
- The Card is the index card that the User Story is written on. The index card format serves two purposes:
- To write requirements on index cards, each requirement has to be small and self-contained; this helps us focus on what we need to do for each requirement and means we won’t get distracted by things that might not be as important.
- Having our requirements written on cards enables us to do things that we weren’t able to do before, for example, we can now lay them out on the table and see the whole picture of our product. We can shuffle priorities much more easily. We can also easily take a single card or group of cards and discuss them separately from the rest of the requirements.
- The Conversation is required to fill in any gaps. Part of the intent of putting User Stories into an index card format is that there isn’t room to write screeds of information. Instead, the card contains enough information for us to start and discover more through collaboration as we go.
The conversation starts when the User Story is first introduced to our team. The story card is read and we seek clarification from our Product Owner. The acceptance criteria are discussed. The team will then try to estimate, and if we don’t have enough information we’ll ask for more.
The conversation will carry on throughout the implementation. During Sprint Planning when we break the User Story into tasks. During the Sprint itself, as we begin to build and test it out, we’re continually refining the story.
Conversations will happen up until the point where the story is delivered into the hands of our customer. The final conversations about a particular User Story are most likely to happen in the Sprint Review, which is where we discuss what we’ve implemented with our stakeholders. - The Confirmation is where we determine if the objective of the User Story is met. At least part of this involves verifying that the acceptance criteria have been fulfilled.
Confirmation starts as soon as we start to get feedback on our implementation and as we start to write acceptance tests. We’ll also seek confirmation by demonstrating working software to our Product Owner and get their feedback.
The final step in our implementation cycle is to include feedback in the form of user acceptance testing before deployment.
The final piece of confirmation comes from our customer that the delivered User Story works as expected.
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