Ahmed’s Dev-Shop

I couldn’t stop myself laughing out loudly when first time I came across the following paragraphs about some Roles defined in Scrum —an Agile development modal.

Several roles are defined in Scrum; these are divided into two groups; Pigs and Chickens, based on a joke about a pig and a chicken.

A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks at the pig and says, “Hey, why don’t we open a restaurant?” The pig looks back at the chicken and says, “Good idea, what do you want to call it?” The chicken thinks about it and says, “Why don’t we call it ‘Ham and Eggs’?” “I don’t think so,” says the pig, “I’d be committed but you’d only be involved.“

So the pigs are committed to building software regularly and frequently, while everyone else are chickens that are interested in the project but are really irrelevant because if it fails they’re not a pig, that is they weren’t the ones that committed to doing it …

The misfortune is that sometimes projects are implemented with the above incomplete and unbalanced specification. Following is the remaining part of this paragraph:

… The needs, desires, ideas and influences of the chicken roles are taken into account, but not in any way letting it affect or distort or get in the way of the actual Scrum project.

Responsibility and Influencing Power should meet at an equilibrium point just like Demand and Supply in economics. Otherwise if you are changing x, you are implicitly changing y. And if you think you can control it, just give it a try.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)#Scrum_roles