What is the Scrum Team?

The Scrum Team is the fundamental unit of Scrum. It is a small team of people, made up of one and only one Scrum Master, one and only one Product Owner, and a number of Developers. Only these three accountabilities are defined for a Scrum Team, and they are all equally important.

What is a team? A team is a group of people who work together and collaborate in pursuit of common goals.

The members of the Scrum Team – that is, the Developers, Product Owner, and Scrum Master – collaborate side by side in their daily work in pursuit of the common goal to achieve success in developing a product based on the generation of value for their customers and users. There are no hierarchies within the Scrum Team. They are all equally accountable for the results of the work.

The Scrum Team is:

cross-functional, which means its members have all the knowledge and skills necessary to develop the product from end to end.
self-managed, since its members decide what will be done, who will do what, how it will be done and when it will be done and conduct the work with autonomy, ownership, and accountability for the results.
a sufficiently small group so that its members can communicate effectively with each other, manage themselves and are able to frequently produce value for their customers and users.

Fun fact: chickens and pigs

*A chicken and a pig are together when the chicken says, *“Let’s open a restaurant!”

*The pig thinks it over and says, *“What would we call this restaurant?”

The chicken says, “Ham ‘n Eggs!”

*The pig says, *“No thanks, I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved!”

The fable of the chicken and the pig has been present since the first book published on Scrum (SCHWABER; BEEDLE, 2002) and continued in the 2009 and 2010 editions of the official Scrum guide (SCHWABER, 2009; SCHWABER; SUTHERLAND, 2010). It was thus part of the official definition of Scrum.

It was used to explain that Scrum Team members are really committed and for that reason they are called “pigs.” The Product Owner is the “pig” of the Product Backlog. The Developers are the “pigs” of the Sprint work. The Scrum Master is the “pig” of the Scrum process. All the others can be called “chickens,” because they are just involved. The main message is that the “chickens” cannot tell the “pigs” how to do their jobs.

The fable of the pig and the chicken still exists in Scrum folklore and was once very present in the language of its practitioners but has lost strength since it was removed from the 2011 edition of the guide (SCHWABER; SUTHERLAND, 2011) and, therefore, from the definition of the framework. As we heard at the time, the authors noted that the fable was being misused, potentially increasing barriers between the Scrum Team and other stakeholders rather than helping to understand the nature of the accountabilities. In addition, many consider the terms “pig” and “chicken” to be derogatory.