How much process should a single developer follow? Is a formal process too much?

Question

Since I didn\'t do a good job writing the last question, and most of the answers were good, but not at all in the direction I intended for the question to go in, I deleted i

Answer 1

This is a very broad question, but perhaps I can help by sharing an experience of mine. I worked for almost 5 years on a hobby game coding project with a couple of friends of mine. A very thightly knit group of developers, we usually tugged our machines into a single apartment for a weekend to develop the project. My point here is that it could be compared to a single person effort, as we were all there to decide on the important design decisions, and so on. 'Process?' No, none I can identify, even in retrospect.

The one thing that kept the source in control was following an 'agile developement' paradigm which we decided to implement from the start: refactor mercilessly. We did, and holy hell did it break the whole game apart all the time. But it did keep the source clean, and when we decided to go for 'stable releases' every now and then, it all seemed to come toghether.