amigos — the session
The amigos session
When a story has its wireframe states, its API contracts, its moment clearly named, the developer who will pull it calls a three-person session — Product Owner, developer, QA. Around 45 to 55 minutes. One story.
The night before
The developer prepares questions before the session — not improvised in the room, prepared the night before. This is the single most important practice in the session. A developer who reads the story carefully and asks "what happens if the student's connection drops exactly when the timer expires and there are two submit requests arriving simultaneously?" has just prevented a race condition from becoming a production incident. That question costs nothing to ask in a 45-minute session. It costs days to fix in production.
Opening with the moment
The Product Owner opens the session not by discussing the system — by placing everyone in the moment. Gal's Tuesday afternoon. Uri's morning after the billing cycle. This is not ceremonial. It is the mechanism that keeps scenario-writing grounded in the person's experience rather than the system's capabilities.
QA writes live
QA writes every answer as a Given–When–Then the moment it is spoken. Not after the session — during it. The happy path first, then each edge case as the developer's questions surface it. Each scenario gets a name — short, specific, from the situation. The scenarios are read back at the end to confirm they reflect what was agreed. (The Given–When–Then format comes from Gherkin, the language of behaviour-driven development; the chain treats Gherkin as the textual form scenarios travel in, not as a tool to evangelise. If you don't know Gherkin, the format will pick itself up in the first session.)
Gherkin Given — person's situation, not system state
✗ "Given the Teacher is on the Results page"
✓ "Given Gal has just closed a 28-student exam and is reviewing results before the end of the school day"
The Given names the person's situation. The scenario tests whether the code changes Gal's situation — the only thing worth testing.