5 Critical Soft Skills for Agile Developers
May 27, 2021

Stewart Dunlop
Udemy

For the majority of people planning a career in software development, it's all about hard skills. It's natural because the technology field is dynamic and it's constantly changing with new frameworks emerging while others become obsolete. Usually, the learning path starts with diving into the basics of computer science, attending web-development courses, and acquiring practice through participation in hackathons, and technical meetups to keep the knowledge relevant.

While these activities are essential to be a good developer, it's only half of the job. Previously, the development process was rather linear that's why the hard skills were given a higher priority. But there are always people behind the great products. This idea called for changes in the used methodologies and gave birth to Agile, the philosophy that transformed the software engineering industry having the massive spread through the last years. Almost 71% of companies adopted the methods offered by this methodology and caused high interest in employees' soft skills.

Agile philosophy always puts people over the processes, thus more and more companies nowadays want to hire specialists with strong soft skills, because they are much harder to develop than closing some technical gaps that come with the experience.

So here we go with the top 5 soft skills that are critical for a developer working in Agile environments:

1. Efficient Communication

Despite the fact that the majority of time developers spend on coding, they also need to communicate a lot. They communicate with co-workers and tech leads to find the best solution to a problem, with a product owner or project management to report the progress and for sure clients to demo the work done, or discuss new technical tasks or project details. Sometimes, the information to deliver is not pleasant, when some request is not achievable from the technical point of view, or you need to defend your point of view in the argument why your solution is better than the colleagues one. So, you will need to know how to learn the basics of nonviolent communication and other strategies to make communication effective.

2. Adaptability

Development work may be unpredictable, because the changes of project scope, or technology
stack, are inevitable. Especially in the Agile environments where continuous delivery and improvements are thriving. There may be many reasons for them and sometimes they are impossible to predict when a force majeure happens, or a business sets up new requirements. Being able to quickly adapt to these changes upskill, and learning how to work with the new technology stack is important for any developer. It's all about embracing agility in practice.

3. Conflict Management

Agile is full of communication and team events where sometimes conflicts are not inevitable. Let's take retrospective sessions where the team is discussing the previous iteration period, be it a sprint or the whole project, and share the views on what was good, what they loved, and what went wrong and could have been done better.

The second part is a tricky one, as it may be hard to explain everything keeping emotions under control, thus there's a high risk of conflicts. They may cause disruption of a friendly atmosphere in the team, and personal tensions negatively impact productivity and project quality. That's why knowing how to turn them into constructive discussions and striving to find win-win situations are vital. Even if you are not in the leading position it's equally beneficial for your growth as a specialist.

4. Proactiveness

In a dynamic environment, changing tasks and priorities, it's easy for developers to become demotivated when they just follow the instructions. Proactiveness here can help to take more control over your work. Developing this skill is critical for career advancement, as the higher the position and the more responsibility it bears, the closer attention is dedicated to the assessment of the candidate's proactiveness. It starts small with being not afraid to clarify why a task should be done this way, offering your ideas on how to improve a certain solution, and enhancing your knowledge by taking on completely new tasks. It's also about sharing concerns and raising red flags that may lead to potential risks on the project.

5. Collaboration

The delivery of a product is only possible with united efforts, where the participation of every individual as well as their interaction with one another plays a huge role and helps to turn all great ideas into practice. So being a team player is probably the first soft skill for a developer. Supporting team members, giving a helpful hand, and working in one direction that are core pillars of collaboration help to achieve the desired results faster.

Performing a self-assessment or asking your direct managers or HR specialists for feedback on the soft skills is the first step to realize your strong and weak points. It helps to outline the development plan and seek ways to improve them. It may include reading professional books and articles, attending workshops, and volunteering to take tasks that will help implement the learned techniques in practice.

Putting the efforts in this direction will be beneficial especially now when the web-development industry is undergoing changes. The tendency of automation and enhancement of the development processes with Artificial Intelligence and smart algorithms that will make code writing easier will transform web development. Thus, the importance of soft skills, interpersonal connections, and the ability to work in a team will become even more important.

Stewart Dunlop is Content Manager at Udemy
Share this

Industry News

January 29, 2025

MacStadium highlighted its major enterprise partnerships and technical innovations over the past year. This momentum underscores MacStadium’s commitment to innovation, customer success and leadership in the Apple enterprise ecosystem as the company prepares for continued expansion in the coming months.

January 29, 2025

Traefik Labs announced the integration of its Traefik Proxy with the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform® (NKP) solution.

January 28, 2025

Perforce Software announced the launch of AI Validation, a new capability within its Perfecto continuous testing platform for web and mobile applications.

January 28, 2025

Mirantis announced the launch of Rockoon, an open-source project that simplifies OpenStack management on Kubernetes.

January 28, 2025

Endor Labs announced a new feature, AI Model Discovery, enabling organizations to discover the AI models already in use across their applications, and to set and enforce security policies over which models are permitted.

January 27, 2025

Qt Group is launching Qt AI Assistant, an experimental tool for streamlining cross-platform user interface (UI) development.

January 27, 2025

Sonatype announced its integration with Buy with AWS, a new feature now available through AWS Marketplace.

January 27, 2025

Endor Labs, Aikido Security, Arnica, Amplify, Kodem, Legit, Mobb and Orca Security have launched Opengrep to ensure static code analysis remains truly open, accessible and innovative for everyone:

January 23, 2025

Progress announced the launch of Progress Data Cloud, a managed Data Platform as a Service designed to simplify enterprise data and artificial intelligence (AI) operations in the cloud.

January 23, 2025

Sonar announced the release of its latest Long-Term Active (LTA) version, SonarQube Server 2025 Release 1 (2025.1).

January 23, 2025

Idera announced the launch of Sembi, a multi-brand entity created to unify its premier software quality and security solutions under a single umbrella.

January 22, 2025

Postman announced the Postman AI Agent Builder, a suite empowering developers to quickly design, test, and deploy intelligent agents by combining LLMs, APIs, and workflows into a unified solution.

January 22, 2025

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the graduation of CubeFS.

January 21, 2025

BrowserStack and Bitrise announced a strategic partnership to revolutionize mobile app quality assurance.

January 21, 2025

Render raised $80M in Series C funding.