Templates · Themed & fun

Three Little Pigs

Sort what the team relies on into houses of straw, sticks and bricks, and decide which weak house to rebuild first.

What it is

The tale of the three pigs and their houses, used as a scale of solidity. Each card names something the team relies on, a practice, a tool, a part of the product, and goes into the house it resembles: straw for what could easily fall apart, sticks for what works but could be improved, bricks for what is strong and stable.

Goal

A shared map of how solid the team’s ways of working are, a decision about which straw house to rebuild first, and a clear view of the bricks that should be left alone.

When to use it

Take it when reliability is the subject: after a rough release, before a period of heavy load, when the team inherits a product or a process, or when it has grown fast and many things were built in a hurry. It rates things and not people, which makes it comfortable for a team that does not yet speak freely.

When to pick another format

The houses say little about how a sprint felt: for that, take Mad, Sad, Glad. If the tale seems childish to the group, WWW (Worked well, Kinda worked, Didn’t work) also has three levels, about what the team tried rather than what it relies on.

How to run it

It helps to say first what would blow on the houses: a traffic peak, a deadline, a colleague leaving.

1. House of straw: ask what would fall at the first push. A step only one person knows, a manual operation, a test nobody trusts.
2. House of sticks: ask what holds today, with effort or with luck, but would not take much more.
3. House of bricks: ask what the team can count on without thinking about it. These cards show what to protect and what to copy.

Group the cards. When the same thing sits in two houses, start the discussion there: the disagreement is the finding. Then vote on the straw and write actions that move one or two things up a house.

Columns

To start a retrospective from this template, see Create a retro.