Pigs and chickens

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Posted at 06:00 on 14 May 2012

Agile practitioners have long referred to participants in the software development process as “pigs” and “chickens.” This comes from an old fable:

A pig and a chicken decide to go into business. After bouncing a few ideas around, they decide to open a restaurant. “What shall we call it?” says the pig. “Ham and eggs,” says the chicken. “No thanks,” says the pig. “You’d just be involved, but I’d be committed.”

Thankfully, this was removed from the latest version of the Scrum Guide.

It’s not difficult to see why. When you say “pigs and chickens” to someone these days, they don’t think about a cheesy, inexplicable, unfunny joke about commitment and involvement and restaurants. They think about this:

Angry Birds

Somehow, I don’t think the idea of developers stealing the stakeholders’ eggs and the stakeholders launching themselves at the developers with a massive slingshot in retaliation would go down that well with management in many organisations.