what we build · part six
Amigos
Three people, one story, forty-five minutes. Gherkin scenarios from the person's situation. Scenario names that travel through every artifact downstream. The last gate before the story is ready to pull.
Events in this phase. Amigos session — Product Owner, developer, QA. 45–55 minutes. One story. The last gate before the story is ready to pull. Daily continues. Retrospective sits at the release boundary, not at the amigos level.
The seeding event for Volume IV
Amigos is the last alignment ceremony in this volume — but it is also something more useful: the moment the artifacts that will run Volume IV are written down. The Gherkin scenarios that emerge from amigos become the names of the tests in the test file. The scenario names travel into PR titles, into bug reports, into incident postmortems. The story name becomes the commit prefix. The wireframe state names anchor the screen names in code. The API contract becomes the integration test. The ADRs become the constraints that code review enforces.
Volume IV will pick up there. Everything that flows out of amigos is what Volume IV's pipeline is built around. This is not a metaphor — these scenarios, contracts, and decisions are the operating constitution of the team's execution. If they leave amigos thin, every Volume IV practice — code review, CI, feature-flag rollout — starts from a thinner base.
What makes a story ready for amigos
A story is ready to enter amigos when three things are true:
- A specific person is named — not "users," not "the teacher," not a role. Gal. Uri. The same person who appeared in the brief.
- An exact moment and context is described — not "when using the grading feature," but "after the exam closes, while 28 submissions are waiting, before the school day ends."
- The done condition is observable from the person's perspective — not "scores are calculated," but "Gal sees all 28 students with their scores already computed, without opening a single submission."