Three Amigos

The Three Amigos are Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh and Ivar Jacobson — the three creators of the Unified Modeling Language. The nickname was coined by specialist press in the 1990s when the three, until then authors of competing object-oriented methodologies, ended up working together at Rational Software after a series of acquisitions.

How the group came about #

Booch had been at Rational since the 1980s (Booch Method). Rumbaugh was in General Electric’s research labs (OMT). Jacobson had founded Objectory AB after leaving Ericsson. Between 1994 (Rumbaugh’s hiring at Rational) and 1995 (acquisition of Objectory AB), the three found themselves in the same company. Between 1995 and 1997 they merged the three methods into UML 1.0, then adopted as an OMG standard in November 1997.

Why it matters as a story #

From a situation of open competition (articles criticising each other, separate conferences, communities watching each other warily), the three moved to co-signing a unified standard. Not out of personal kindness, but because of a shared recognition that none of the three methods would win alone. It’s a textbook case of professional convergence in a technical field — rare enough to deserve a name.

The name’s revival in BDD #

In Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) practices, a ceremony is called the Three Amigos meeting: three people (developer, tester, business analyst) who discuss a user story together before starting it. The name is an explicit homage to the original group, and the conceptual structure is the same — three different angles on the same object produce something better than any of them in isolation.