Question

Can I develop my application in alone, using the Agile development methodologies (i think that this methodologies orientate on development in team). What’s the principles i could using? Sorry for my bad English

Answer 1

While all the previous answers are correct in that you certainly can use agile techniques while being a one-man team (within reason, as Oded pointed out there is little value in having standups or retrospectives by yourself), I would question the value of each practice that you adopt.

• Is there a point in having a build, perhaps, what about continuous integration – a waste of time, you have bigger fish to fry.
• Releasing often is probably a good idea.
• Do you need a backlog, it all depends on who defines your requirements and how big the piece of software you’re building is in the first place.
• Do you need iterations – even people in the agile community have started to question their value.

Is this piece of software always going to be maintained by you, or will you hand it over? If you’re gonna hand it over a good test suite is the courteous thing to do, but if it will always be you, don’t bother with anything massive only test the bits you’re unsure about. I certainly wouldn’t bother with TDD, there is no-one around to be impressed with how test-first you are and unless you’re an expert it will slow you down.

End of the day, when it comes to developing software by yourself, I think you need to keep an eye firmly on the prize, which is to deliver a working system in a reasonable amount of time. As long as you keep that in mind it doesn’t matter what process you end up using, there is no-one there to be tripped up by weird practices except yourself.