The Three Little Pigs is a fun exercise to identify a team's weak, stable, and solid structures.
Identifying weak points
At any point of reflection
The Three Little Pigs is a fun exercise that uses the metaphor of a wolf trying to blow down three pigs’ houses made of straw, wood, and brick - to get a team to classify a set of things into categories of weak, stable, and solid.
This exercise can be used as a sprint retrospective, but can also be used more broadly - for example, to review a team’s processes, product, or robustness of technical components.
The team classifies things into three categories:
Most templates for this exercise just include the three pigs and their houses, but we included the Big Bag Wolf - you can’t ignore the threat of his powerful lungs!
The Wolf is an added concept that gets the team thinking about the future - for example, what risks do each of the components actually face, and how does that factor into the urgency of upgrading them.
The Wolf also helps the team discuss risks within context - if you end the exercise after only classifying the components into robustness, you might miss the ‘so what’ aspect to the exercise, which really should involve quantifying the business risk or gains of improving weaker components.