Agile Teams – Minimum Team Size for Agile Benefits

agileteam

I work at a company that has repeatedly cut the sizes of its development team, to the point that previous 10-man teams are now down to one developer per product (and a couple of testers shared between 5 products). We used to be fairly process heavy, having been a spin off from a larger company, and inherited its multi-stage waterfall process.

It has come down from the executive team that we are not releasing software fast enough, and that this is likely the fault of the process (which may be a contributor, although the 90% loss of manpower probably didn't help). There has been a push for us to move to an Agile process to avoid spending time writing design documents, etc.

I guess I'm just curious as to whether a switch to Agile will help with single-person teams. It was my understanding that a lot of the benefits come from higher visibility and more communication between team members, but I know what I'm doing and so does my manager. I already do TDD since we have no one to test the product anyway.

TL;DR version: I guess what I'm really asking is, can you implement Agile with single-person 'teams', and do you see any benefits from it, or is it usually something that's more effective for larger teams?

Best Answer

Check out https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/solo-scrum

and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/829497/agile-methods-specifically-taylored-to-working-solo

Update:
The first link is to the Solo Scrum Google Group. The most obvious benefit talked about here is using time-boxed sprints to manage scope and determine project velocity--both very good things.

The second link is to a previous discussion on Stackoverflow, which might indicate this is a duplicate question, but I thought it would be more useful to link to it. It in turn links to http://c2.com/xp/ExtremeProgrammingForOne.html which has a lot of links and info about doing XP solo (sans pair programming).

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