What is Pig and Chicken in Scrum?

The business fable of The Chicken and the Pig explains breakfast pigs and chickens in the Scrum process. It’s a way to differentiate between roles in the Scrum/Agile world. Roles are key in Agile. They are constant and form the basis of every decision and define the very basic human relationships in Scrum.

Pig and Chicken Fable

The fable of the Chicken and the Pig is used to illustrate the differing levels of project stakeholders involved in a project. The basic fable runs:

A Pig and a Chicken are walking down the road.

The Chicken says: “Hey Pig, I was thinking we should open a restaurant!”

Pig replies: “Hm, maybe, what would we call it?”

The Chicken responds: “How about ‘ham-n-eggs’?”

The Pig thinks for a moment and says: “No thanks. I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved.”

Sometimes, the story is presented as a riddle;

Question: In a bacon-and-egg breakfast, what’s the difference between the Chicken and the Pig?

Answer: The Chicken is involved, but the Pig is committed!

Scrum pig and chicken
Scrum pig and chicken

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Pig and Chicken in Scrum Context

The business fable of The Chicken and the Pig is about commitment to a project or cause. When producing a dish made of ham and eggs, the pig provides the ham which requires his sacrifice and the chicken provides the eggs which are not difficult to produce. Thus the pig is really committed in that dish while the chicken is only involved, yet both are needed to produce the dish.

In the Context of Scrum, chickens have input on the product that will be developed, but pigs decide how it’s going to be done and the rate at which it can be accomplished.  Thus, the pigs include the development team members, product owner who represents the chickens, and the Scrum Master, responsible for organizing a sort of Scrum events especially during Scrum stand-ups, while the customer, vendor, executives and other important people with vision are, in fact, the chickens in Scrum.

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Visual Paradigm help organizations stay competitive and responsive to change faster and better in today’s fast changing environment. Our award-winning products are trusted by over 320,000 users in companies ranging from small business, consultants, to blue chip organizations, universities and government units across the globe. It enables organizations to improve business and IT agility and foster innovation through popular open standards and process frameworks.Visual Paradigm, a killer Agile feature in 2018, introduced Scrum Process Canvas for automating the way a Scrum team to create, manage and deploy software application that empowers the team to continuously improve their performance at unprecedented speed and scale.

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