While rubber ducking usually is a great idea, I recently had a pretty odd experience with the concept. The company in question was a really tiny one, with a high rotation of developers - at one time the flock of developers were reduced to just one waiting for more to be hired to replace the old worn-out programmers Now, it was mandated from above that the development team must use scrum, since apparently that solved everything. Even though this scrum team only had one guy on it. The lone developer protested loudly saying, I can't stand in front of the whiteboard talking to myself. So they got him a rubber duck. A really big rubber duck. An actual rubber duck which was introduced to him by the manager saying "Now you can hold your daily meetings, meet Dennis, your new scrum partner". It didn't really catch on...