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 approach to estimation used by Agile teams. Each team member "plays" a card bearing a numerical value corresponding to a point estimation for a user story.
An iteration is a timebox during which development takes place. The duration may vary from project to project and is usually fixed.
Exploratory testing is, more than strictly speaking a "practice," a style or approach to testing software which is often contrasted to "scripted testing."
A basic task board is divided into three columns labeled "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done." Cards are placed in the columns reflecting the current status.
A Milestone Retrospective is a team's detailed analysis of the project's significant events after a set period of time or at the project's end.
Teams use a ubiquitous language to use the vocabulary of a business in the requirements, design discussions and source code for a software product.

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