Can one person adopt Agile techniques? [closed]

Answer 1

Yes - it is possible to do many agile practices as an individual.

If you already know how to do these, you can do them as a sole developer:

• test-driven development - great place to start
• refactoring
• continuous integration
• doing the simplest thing that could possibly work (and evolving it through refactoring)
• automated deployment
• planning meetings (a team of one plus customer)

Things you can't do on your own:

• pair programming
• CRC/RRC workshops (... you'd have to talk to yourself quite a lot)

Answer 2

YES.

Agile is more of a state of mind than just a methodology of software development like waterfall. Scrum is one of the very popular agile methodologies. You can study below aspects of scrum in detail:

1. Benefits of Scrum/Agile over Waterfall
2. How can you create better "products" with Scrum/Agile
3. What are the types of projects better suited for Scrum
4. Pros and Cons of Scrum
5. Scrum Rituals and why are they necessary (What advantage do they bring)
6. Different roles in scrums and their responsibilities (Scrum Master, Product Owner and Development Team)

After you have good understanding of working of scrum and its benefits, try to create a pet project. You will have to play all the roles yourself. You can try to distinguish between what role you are playing currently by wearing different colored hats for each role.

Example:

Product owner : Think from product perspective, what should be the features in the product and why would they be important for your users etc. Then proceed with all the scrum practices.

Scrum Master: Keep checking if you are following all scrum rituals in the right sense and spirit and are you able to derive benefits out of it.

There will be limitations,example you cannot have Daily stand-up meeting, obviously because you are the only person in the project. But if you follow above, you should be good to secure a job and play your part well in the team.

Answer 3

Yes

XP/TDD scales from one to one thousand. Pair programming is optional.

Answer 4

While some Agile practices are directly targeted at more than one person teams, they are just practices, they are just a mean, not an end. I mean, Agile is not about doing pair programming, stand up meetings, etc. Agile is about maximizing the customer value while minimizing waste to provide the most optimal ROI. Agile is business oriented, practices are just a way to achieve this goal in a given context. So, back to the initial question, it's definitely possible to adopt Agile practices (that make sense in your context) to maximize the delivered value: continuous planning, limiting Work In Progress, Stop-the-Line culture, time boxing, high quality, just enough specifications, just enough and just in time documentation, etc, etc.