Agile Glossary

The Three C’s

What is The Three C’s?

“Card, Conversation, Confirmation”; this formula (from Ron Jeffries) captures the components of a User Story:

  • a “Card” (or often a Post-It note), a physical token giving tangible and durable form to what would otherwise only be an abstraction:
  • a “conversation” taking place at a different time and places during a project between the various people concerned by a given feature of a software product: customers, users, developers, testers; this conversation is largely verbal but most often supplemented by documentation;
  • the “confirmation”, finally, the more formal the better, that the objectives the conversation revolved around have been reached.

Origins

  • 2001: the Card, Conversation, Confirmation model is proposed by Ron Jeffries to distinguish “social” user stories from “documentary” requirements practices such as use cases

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Additional Agile Glossary Terms

An acceptance test is a formal description of the behavior of a software product, generally expressed as an example or a usage scenario. A number of different notations and approaches have been proposed for such examples or scenarios.
Mock Objects (commonly used in the context of crafting automated unit tests) consist of instantiating a test-specific version of a software component.
The acronym INVEST stands for a set of criteria used to assess the quality of a user story. If the story fails to meet one of these criteria, the team may want to reword it.
The team meets regularly to reflect on the most significant events that occurred since the previous such meeting, and identify opportunities for improvement.
Members of an Agile development team normally choose which tasks to work on, rather than being assigned work by a manager.
The daily meeting is structured around the following three questions: What have you completed? What will you do next? What is getting in your way?

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