Is Scrum useful for single programmer developments?

Question

I lead a team of six programmers, and we are presently implementing a number of agile development practices. I'm very interested in Scrum, however it seems to assume that your project will have multiple developers. Most of my projects are smaller, and involve a single developer. We run 3 or 4 such projects in parrallel at any time.

From reading Schwaber, a lot of the benefit of Scrum seems to derive from teams self-organising to achieve a complex task. If you have a single developer doing all the work, will Scrum deliver much value?

Answer 1

The standup meetings might look a bit weird...

Answer 2

I think that the value you may get can come from scrum or other agile concepts.

For example, instead of a weird standup meeting, have the one developer tell you why he has taken x desicion for the y task. You may or may not be able to suggest things (depends on your background as a developer I guess), but the fact that the developer is hearing his own explanation might be useful for finding bugs or dead-end reasonings.

As a professor of mine once commented on asking yourself a question aloud: "If you ask the universe for an answer, it will give you one"

Answer 3

Scrum might be more than you need as a single developer, but if you have a stake holder and a QA person then Scrum can still be helpful. Remember they are apart of your team, and should be at your standups to trade information with the team.

If you are truly alone there are other agile practices that might make more sense to you. For example, Kanban might be a better fit. You don't have iteration overhead, retros, sprint planning, etc. You just have a backlog that you pull tasks from. This works well as a way to organize your work, allows stake holders to adjust priorities, and works well for a single developer or small team where you can break up work without a lot of need to synchronize between developers. Maybe you have a product built that only has small features that doesn't need a lot of architecture being built to support new features. Or lots of small projects that are independent say for advertising firms, etc.

Answer 4

While, as others have pointed out, the daily standup may be weird, there's still value for an individual developer in adopting a scrum-'like' process.

Timeboxed, potentially releasable, iterations and a stack-ranked backlog can only help an individual developer keep focused on actually getting something done instead of endlessly ratholing.

Answer 5

The single most important benefit of Scrum that is there even if there is just one developer is not the daily sync (meeting), but rather the limitation on context switches. While working in sprints this single developer can concentrate on given stories within his (presumably short) sprint knowing he won't be interrupted or pushed to do something else before finishing this.

Less context switching == less waste == more productivity.

BTW - Kanban offers less overhead than Scrum, but it is easier to circumvent and force developer to context switch. This can be a benefit but can easily become a problem too.