Top 5 Attributes of Talented Agile Developers

Instituting the agile development life cycle in an enterprise requires technology talent. I made this statement in Getting Enterprises Executives to buy into an Agile Development Lifecycle. Here are my top 5 attributes of talented agile developers and what I meant by 'technology talent':

1. Agile thinkers are fast thinkers. They solve problems quickly and look for easy solutions. They are not afraid of what they do not know and are quick to research what they need to know. They understand that a B solution, in an academic sense may be an A solution in a business or technology sense.

2. They are excellent communicators. Agile is practiced in teams. The workspace at BusinessWeek is open and often noisy with people thinking through solutions. It's very common for someone from the Business team to come in and ask questions. Gone are the days of the guru developer buried at his or her workstation.

3. They must understand and practice Quality Assurance. While Test Driven Development is not part of the agile manifesto, some form of it is often practiced in agile life cycles. Why? Because in order to deliver production quality software at the end of an iteration, developers must participate in the testing process. In other words, most testing (not all - subject for another day) must occur in cycle. Developers need to do a combination of unit testing and providing the right test harnesses for QA early in the development cycle.

4. Agile developers need to know how to read and enhance other people's code. If your iterating, then you're building on top of an existing code base. In most situations, that means you're enhancing code written by someone else, so you better find developers that can read, reverse engineer, and refactor an existing code base.

A corollary to this: Developers need to know how to write code that is readable. Because someone else will be editing their code, because the best documentation is code that follows good naming conventions and engineering practices, and because agile deemphasizes documentation. Simple code reviews can help!

5. Agile developers need to be open minded and open to changes. Because after all, the business is going to adjust priorities every development iteration. Because developers will have to help make the business case for addressing technical debt. Because the agile development process and supporting processes will evolve depending on business needs.

Notice, no where do I mention that agile developers have to be the best or fastest Java/.Net/PHP programmers!
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Is Your Enterprise Ready for Agile Development?

What happens when an Enterprise wants to 'go agile'?

One of the beauties of agile is in its name. Who doesn't want to be agile? Can you imagine CIO of X Enterprise saying he or she doesn't want their IT departments to be agile? Agile proponents did themselves a favor adopting the generic 'agile development' to represent processes like SCRUM, Extreme Programming, etc.

But enterprises have a few issues to contend with when going agile. Enterprises are big, decentralized, with legacy technologies, standards processes, and governance concerns. Agile teams and development life cycles create challenges to those who are responsible for these enterprise structures. For example, how can agile teams experiment with new technologies and be allowed to 'fail early'? Are you willing to tear down the cubes and build open work spaces? Will your business people be open to collaborating with technologists? Are you open to a different approach to managing and measuring projects? Do your technology choices easy lend themselves to agile (think fast) development cycles?  

Also, agile practitioners (product owners, scrum masters, developers, etc.) must realize that practicing agile in an enterprise is different than the ideal environments described in literature or practiced in startups. For example, there are practical limits to self organization. 

In my last post on Getting Enterprise Executives to buy in to an Agile Development Lifecycle, I stated that organizational dynamics and culture play a significant role in the success or failure of adopting agile. This is a relatively short post on the subject, but 'going agile' can't just be isolated to the development teams. Are you ready?


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About Isaac Sacolick

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, a digital transformation influencer, and has over 900 articles published at InfoWorld, CIO.com, his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights @NYIke on Twitter, his Driving Digital Standup YouTube channel, or during the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.