Can one person adopt Agile techniques? [closed]

Question

Looking for work at the moment, I'm seeing a lot of places asking for Agile experience, but until I get a job with a team that is using Agile, I suspect I'll never get the experience.

Is it possible to adopt Agile methodologies with just one person?

Sort of answering my own question, there's similar questions at :-

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1407189/can-agile-scrum-be-used-by-1-or-2-developers

(I guess I should get better at searching.)

Answer 1

You seem to be coming at this from a work experience point of view; if you are looking to build relevant experience to get you a job on an agile project I would probably think a little more laterally.

Firstly could you work with others, maybe on an open source project? That would be a good opportunity to try out agile methods with others who may have more experience.

Secondly, you could look at using some of the common techniques or tools, even if it's just to learn how the tools work - e.g. you could set up a continues integration server to run builds and unit tests when you check in code. If you are working on your own you won't gain much in terms of productivity by doing this but you would gain some skills and have something relevant to say to future employers which would indicate you are committed to the agile style.

Answer 2

Yes

Check out PXP or Personal Extreme Programming.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1593127

Summary from the paper:

Personal Extreme Programming (PXP) is a software development process for a single person team. It is based on the values of Extreme Programming (XP) i.e. simplicity, communication, feedback, and courage. It works by keeping the important aspects of XP and refining the values so that they can fit in a lone programmer situation. PXP can still be refined and improved. It is in the tradition of XP practitioners to vary XP to encompass whatever works. We hope that PXP inherits these pragmatic roots, as well. Giving up XP tenets like pair programming is not necessarily a tragedy. We still believe that following XP strictly is a more effective way to pursue multi-person projects. But we are also convinced that many of the XP practices and methods can be applied to individual work. The PXP approach tries to balance between the "too heavy" and the "too light" methodologies. PXP will inject the right amount of rigor for the situation without overburdening the team with unnecessary bureaucracy.