In my continuous quest to learn how to develop better software I’ve been reading a lot of articles warning us of the risks of ‘using Agile’. Often these articles or their comments have something along the lines of, “there are 3 types of developers, the bright ones, the normal ones and the stupid ones. The bright ones will make any methodology work and the stupid ones will make any methodology fail so we have to look out for ‘normal’ developers…”. Every time I read this it frustrates and annoys me so I thought I’d make my feelings public in the hope that someone will benefit from my opinion.

In my time as a software developer I haven’t yet met a developer who isn’t bright. I have though, been in the position where I was considered to be the weak link in the team and almost didn’t pass my probationary period. I have since been told I was “the biggest talent”. What happened to me to go from one end of the spectrum to the other? I went from working under high pressure at a finance software consultancy where everything was waterfall, software quality was not high and nobody had heard of the agile manifesto to working for an open-minded, enthusiastic and fun website. This agile environment enabled me to be more creative and increased my confidence which in turn lead me to learn faster and become a much better developer who could provide more value to the team. Agile development is about getting the most out of a team, using an Agile (with a capital A) process is only a small part of this.

If a team isn’t producing, don’t blame it on the process or team members, first ask, “is the team happy and are they encouraged to be creative”? I would hazard a guess that more often than not the answers are no and I am absolutely sure that if you change this then your team will improve rapidly.