I think success requires strong developers, not really Agile. I was thinking more along the lines of – can you be successful with a mediocre team? Depends on how you define success

Developers reach the level their “manager” lets them get to.

By “manager” I mean person who removes obstacles, coaches teammates and fights for the project to make reasonable choices. Interestingly a great deal of agile is aligned with modern (post Drucker) management, someday I’ll write some post on it. But from what I’ve seen it’s just to big a leap for most “used to be a developer and now I run the shop” managers to understand how run things without defining all the little details.

Agile requires a good “manager”, who isn’t afraid to lose their command and control. I think it’s funny that when things go wrong everyone says “we need more control”, better specs, _a clear professional designation_, bigger sticks.

With a good “manager” mediocre developers can be grown to great. A good team can be grown from the average. Agile can flourish, with developers taking ownership and be pushed to learn new things. They might even become so engaged they do it on their own.

And that is the problem with mediocre developers. No one helped them become great. Its not that they are incompetent.

Look it… Everyone is good at something and bad at others. Everyone. Great developers found those things and worked hard at them. Some people are great at deployment or installs or algorithms or UI. No one is a 10x developer at everything AND all teams need all those role filled one way or another.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

-End Rant

Marc Lawrence

PS I think some of the other comments are on the right track, just not the OP.

Saying that, it also depends on the kind of developer. Are they willing to grow and improve themselves or to they just the kind that are happy to just come to work everyday. You need those go-getters (not the arrogant, i know it all type) to drive innovation.

But when they are given the right tools to communicate and collaborate, we discover that a large number of cross-trainings occur spontaneously (and in surprising directions), and the quality of the product, its design, and the team all go up considerably.

Few people really want to settle for career mediocrity, but they have to have an encouraging environment where they can grow. It’s also downright cruel to take great developers and toss them into a mediocre process.

So you need both: A good process that allows true collaboration to occur without teammates competing amongst themselves, and one or two strong leaders or technically strong developers to spread their wisdom and to mine for hidden gems of knowledge.

Dare I say that defining failure and trying to not reach it is the definition of mediocrity.

I think it’s a myth that you can take a sub-par team, throw agile practices at them, at them suddenly turn into an amazing team.

In fact, the studies show not that, but instead that a well functioning team can beat the productivity of a single rock-star developer. Of course it helps to have good developers. But I have seen first hand that you can take a team of middle-ground developers and turn them into something great.

It becomes, then, a balance of the needs in the organization. Teams with developers who understand principles like SOLID, or who do things like TDD are already going to care more about their code, which means that the focus can be on continuing to grow them. In a team without that, you have to have a solid coach who can build the group together to a team, then improve their practices. Oftentimes the engineering practices aren’t the only ones suffering – it’s also the requirements and the overall organizational vision and agility.

I absolutely agree that process by itself won’t change a team. But with the right practices, the right coach, and the right sponsorship from management, you can take a mediocre team and turn them into a high-functioning team. I’ve seen it first-hand. They may not have been as good as some of the incredible teams I’ve been able to be a part of, but compared to the industry norm, they were head and shoulders above the rest.