the chicken and the pig

Once upon a time I had official scrum master training with Ken Schwaber.

Besides the general scrum knowledge I acquired some details have stuck with me, like the bill-shaped duck call he would use to get peoples' attention. (He said people were less likely to steal it.)
 

Also this introductory line which seems oddly belligerent, but reflects the Scrum folks' faith that they had the better idea (and indeed they did make the new standard, even if few places practice the pure version) is this:

You suck... and that makes me sad.

Also I remember hearing this story, not quite sure if this exactly the version but:

A man walks into Fat Burger and orders a Double Fatburger, fries, and a drink.

Man only has $3.15 but the total comes to $7.15. The manager tells him he’s going to remove something from his order.  But the man insisted to have it all.

The manager doesn’t want to lose the customer so he walks out and finds a dead squirrel off the street.  He makes the burger by cooking the squirrel and putting it on a bun and hands it over to the man.

So if you draw the analogy of the story with the scenario above, it clearly seems that team compromises the quality just to deliver the product on time.

In order to achieve the unrealistic deadlines, first thing teams do is to discard the automated tests and stops refactoring the code. Soon after their code resembles coding they did in high school and they are making a huge mess.

But mostly I remember the metaphor of the chicken and the pig:

 

(Here's Vizdos' page on the origin of the cartoon)

The metaphor was that developer are the "pigs" whose bacon is on the line, so to speak, while the other people involved were "chickens" without skin in the game, and so should be quiet observers during the daily standup, for instance.

OK, for one thing, that is a WEIRD metaphor. Way back when I sketched out a different final panel:

(Ken Schwaber was amused by the panel and asked to keep it.)

But that really tied into my problem with the metaphor; Product Owners and other non-devs DO have skin in the game, their jobs and reputations are at stake as well, and in some ways it's even tougher for them because they are dependent on devs and can't just "work harder" to get better results. (also true Scrum aims to guarantee predictability over time, and has relatively little to say about efficiency and timeliness.  As my team lead Steve Katz put it: "the process isn't about not getting fired")

I guess they've moved on from the chicken/pig metaphor anyway - it was a little too joke-y, and I think other people shared my view that non-dev stakeholders are still critical to the success of a project.