"Agile" is a marketing term: it brands various best practices in iterative and incremental development. You go to a bookstore and want to read a mystery? They have a whole section labeled "Mystery" where you get all kinds of good stuff. You want to learn how groups of people work well together in tech? Go to the "Agile" section.
I like this, but it's tough for many people to grok, because it's not a detailed instruction book, like some other methodologies.
If you want to stay current in how people are doing cool stuff, consume Agile material on a regular basis. But take it all with a grain of salt: you learn stuff and then try it. What works in one situation won't work in another. One of the things practitioners learned early on is that tech is 95%+ about people, not bits and bytes. People tend to be a few orders of magnitude more difficult than, say, C++
I would hire people with good aptitude and attitude over people with good technical chops any day of the week. It's not even close. I've seen too many teams of great people walk into a project not knowing any of the tech involved -- and kick ass. I've also seen a tremendous number of highly-skilled teams create a death march/miserable existence for themselves where they could get nothing done at all.
What do you mean by soft skills? Soft skills for a manager might be an agreeable developer, who agrees to unreasonable deadlines. The manager would would say he had a good positive attitude, but the project would certainly fail.
Soft Skills from the development teams perspective is assertiveness. The ability to say no(in a nice way) to an unreasonable request, without some kind of compromise on timeline or scope. A manager might say that guy is unreasonable, stubborn or manipulative(if you say no diplomatically). However the project has a higher chance of succeeding towards realistic goals.
Point being soft skills means different things to different people.
> Soft Skills from the development teams perspective is assertiveness.
It's also "not being a dick to your fellow team members". One asshole can poison an entire team's culture. Besides, if you're doing Scrum remotely close to how it was intended, the only person who needs to be able to tell the product owner to fuck off nicely is the scrum master.
Have you not watched the video? Agile is a scam. Even one of the signers of The Agile Manifesto himself just admitted it on camera.
That some people will continue to give credence to an outright scam after it's been exposed and admitted to by one of its foremost practitioners is just a sad statement on humanity.
I like this, but it's tough for many people to grok, because it's not a detailed instruction book, like some other methodologies.
If you want to stay current in how people are doing cool stuff, consume Agile material on a regular basis. But take it all with a grain of salt: you learn stuff and then try it. What works in one situation won't work in another. One of the things practitioners learned early on is that tech is 95%+ about people, not bits and bytes. People tend to be a few orders of magnitude more difficult than, say, C++