What Aspects of Agile Software Development are Working for Soloists?
I asked this question on Twitter and received some interesting and thoughtful responses. So, those of you who didn’t can’t the question on Twitter. If you consider yourself an Agile Development Methodology practitioner and work either alone or in a small team (1-2 people), which aspects of Agile work for you?
I am a freelancer and talk to teams about their approach to Agile. I always hear repeated talk about:
- Peer programming
- Customer on-site
- Morning stand-up
As a solo developer working from home I see the huge benefits to Agile development but don’t have a peer to code with, no need for a stand-up, and no appropriate to have a customer in my home office. I practice some of the obvious things I can do alone:
- Test-Driven Development (TDD)
- Refactoring
- Short Iterations
I would like to hear folks who have this experience and what works and what doesn’t. Does being in a small team, even solo, give you too much freedom to let iterations or sprint goal slip? Have you changed your approach to Agile to customize it to work in this situation?
I see the amount of soloists and small teams growing over the next few years. I think Agile methodologies to be very good at keeping us motivated and focused on our work but the majority of of Agile really deals with larger teams. So, maybe cutting out what doesn’t work from the Agile Manifesto and tweaking what does for our unique position can benefit all of us.
So please let me know what is working and what is not.