Can two developers form an agile team?

Question

I am working on a company's project alone at the moment, but the company is getting soon a junior developer whom I will be mentoring. Considering he will be learning a lot in first few days I am planning on using pair programming for first couple of weeks. I believe that doing pair programming would make daily standup a redundant practice. I definitely will keep the retrospective as well as tdd.

I wanted to ask if you would suggest any other agile practices that would benefit our small team of two developers? What have worked for you?

Answer 1

I am doing it with a team of one currently (I have been promised help in the near future).

But I find it useful for planning (I drag in other developers to help in estimation processes so it is not just me) and tracking progress (for both me and the management team).

Also when other team members join they will be able to see what tasks are currently available to work on and be able to jump in and help.

During planning it still works for prioritization and the demo are still cool.

Answer 2

You're assuming that daily stand-up is just for the developers. While it does have some benefit for them, it also has benefit for BAs, QA, etc. in having a regular time that they can hear what's going on and discover issues of miscommunication (most of the problems in software development), or which jobs are taking longer than initially predicted (allowing for minor reprioritisation, within the sprint, and for QA to know when they expect jobs to be delivered).

I have also worked on a team of two who used Agile estimation techniques and who kept a task board up to date, which is both useful and satisfying for the developers themselves and a very visible, constant representation of a sprint to the other stakeholders.