UPDATE: I wanted to note that I am not endorsing SCRUM as the end-all-beat-all process for software development. I just wanted to illustrate that I like the “chicken and pig” story. SCRUM does has it’s downside as I clarify down below in the comments. No process is as productive as conversation which is something that SCRUM tries to minimize and mitigate.

I’ve been doing a lot of research lately into agile project development process. I found it interesting that while at opus:creative (Opus Creative Group), on one major project of mine, I was actually utilizing SCRUM as an active process. I had adapted into this process naturally based upon the constraints of the particular project. Essentially it boiled down that the client needed to see a working model each week in order to publish the build internally. Typical Opus process wouldn’t have allowed this and so I adapted. Come to find out: it was an agile development process called: SCRUM.

In my research into agile/SCRUM, I found the delineation of roles to be superb and comically accurate. There are only two types of roles in SCRUM: Pigs and Chickens. Pigs (such a Nine Inch Nails term!) are the developers, IA, UX, designers etc… while Chicken are account executives, strategists, project managers. Why would they possibly be named this? Here’s why:

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.”

Scrum was developed to cut out overhead on large software projects. Essentially, the issue of developers that would come into presentations with no deliverable completed because of communication meetings with uninvolved personnel (account executives, project managers etc.). Scrum removes the Chickens from the equation by allowing them into the development cycle ONLY at the end of the sprint. If they require additional information, they can look -themselves- at the backlog document which is updated organically, daily, but the Chicken can’t influence the sprint until the end of the week cycle.

Brilliant.

This puppy has nothing to do with the article except that she's sleeping with a pig. Photo by J.