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

Agile teams generally prefer to express estimates in units other than the time-honored "man-hours." Possibly the most widespread unit is "story points."
Mock Objects (commonly used in the context of crafting automated unit tests) consist of instantiating a test-specific version of a software component.
The team has the use of a dedicated space for the duration of the project, set apart from other groups' activities.
Members of an Agile development team normally choose which tasks to work on, rather than being assigned work by a manager.
Business agility is the ability of an organization to sense changes internally or externally and respond accordingly in order to deliver value to its customers.
Agile teams generally prefer to express estimates in units other than the time-honored "man-hours." Possibly the most widespread unit is "story points."

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