Pigs, and Chickens, and Agile, Oh My!

Apologies in advance to the Wizard of Oz folks, but it's a very memorable line. One of the concepts we've used in our implementation of agile has been the notion of pigs and chickens to define roles in a sprint team. The terms actually derive from the joke about breakfast. The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.

• A pig is a team member who owns a deliverable in a sprint and must complete tasks for that sprint. Examples: product managers, user experience, developers, QA, docs.
• A chicken is a stakeholder who has input into the deliverables but is not directly responsible for producing the deliverable(s). My fellow managers and I are chickens, for the most part.

Agile is all about empowering the pigs to make decisions and get their work done in the most efficient manner. Pigs and chickens can attend scrums, but it's the pigs who do the talking. If they need information from a chicken, they can ask the chicken. But the scrum meeting is pig domain. It's the place where the team members who are responsible for deliverables talk about their deliverables. The scrums have become efficient, focused meetings where the team gets down to business. It's been a pretty cool transformation to watch!