What happens when Scrum pigs meet Chicken Little?

One day Chicken Little was picking up corn in the barnyard when—bop!—an acorn fell and hit him upon the head. "Goodness gracious me!" said Chicken Little, "the sky is falling. I must go and tell the world."

Do you know Chicken Little or someone like him? As this article is being read at Decade Software, at least four people will insist that I am talking about them, but—most likely—they are jumping to conclusions, as any good Chicken Little might do.

In Scrum, everything is built upon task transparency and peer accountability. Pigs—those committed to getting the work done and the problems solved—cannot always do everything without input from the chickens—those stakeholders who are not actively involved in the day to day work.

This works well as long as the farm—uh, I mean product—owner can collect valuable input from the chickens and prioritize it accordingly.

Problems arise, only when Chicken Little enters the barnyard. Neither the Product Owner nor the team can correct problems no one has defined.

The moral of this story? It is imperative that any working Scrum team have a process in place that tracks defects with reproducible steps. It is also imperative that a process exist to corral—even silence—Chicken Little.

Nothing is always as it seems. Unproven accusations make everyone look and feel bad—decreasing morale—unnecessarily.

So, the next time a chicken says the sky is falling, make him give you reproducible steps to prove it.