Skill-Driven Development

There was a nice discussion yesterday at the meeting of the Scrum User Group Karlsruhe. We talked about dysfunctional Scrum organizations and the new roles of lost middle-managers. At some point a participant said that with really good people one could create really good products regardless of any methodology--either waterfall or agile would work. That lead me to the following statement:

Skill-driven development helps a lot to create working results.
Unfortunately skill-driven teams are not the norm.

So what can you do to improve your own and your team's skills?

• Improve your agile coaching
• Coach your team
• Learn to be patient and disciplined: handle the untrained team
• Surround yourself with people better than you: hire drive-driven personalities (if you are not able to collect the people around you, try to choose an existing team/organization with higher skills than your own)
• Get involved with the Agile Skills Project
• Help the team to improve: facilitate retrospective meetings
• Read at least one book on agile/development topics every other month
• Support or become a Clean Code Developer (German content only)
• Join and get active in a local user group
• Attend conferences: listen to talks, participate in workshops

This list for sure is not complete. There are more ways how to create a skill-driven development environment. If you have any ideas, please leave a comment.