Can you scrum on your own?

An interesting question posed by Peter Bell at this year's SPA conference. His premise was that some of the lean and agile approaches can be equally applicable when you are THE team. He called his approach Solo Scrum.

Peter identified a couple of scenarios where he felt that 'Solo Scrum' could be appropriate:

• A full time developer doing open source development part-time
• A solo consultant developing applications for non-technical clients
• A 'work at home' contractor managing multiple clients

Clearly working on your own brings a number of challenges (note that I didn't say problems!) which need to be considered when working on your own. I think that probably one of the biggest challenges to overcome, (and this is based on personal experience), is to try and avoid too many distractions within the 'home' work area. The second challenge is that of loneliness! In the many (professional) development projects that I have worked, talking to colleagues has been a great way of confirming your thoughts for a solution or helping to find a way through a problem. When you are on your own, this isn't possible, or is it? However the use of technology can certainly help (think of IM, email, VOIP (with video)) and it can certainly be seen as 'virtual' pair programming. This isn't a new idea (see here); however, there is still the problem of finding a suitable 'pair' to link up with.

The traditional problems of planning don't go away when working on your own (as I said at the session 'Fail to plan, plan to fail'). Working on your own necessitates an efficient process for planning and managing the plan (a bit more than the 'back of an envelope' note). There are a number of Eclipse plugins (e.g. mylyn) which offer the right balance in terms of monitoring the work activity without distracting from the task-at-hand.

Some interesting ideas were discussed, including the observation that many team collaboration software packages often includes a free version for a small team (where small can be up to 5). This can overcome a often heard comment which was that I don't have the time/experience/etc to set up a 'professional' development environment (the minimum being a source control system, an IDE and a bug tracking system) from scratch.

Peter has now started a Google group to further the debate. I will watch with interest.