How To Tell If Someone Has The Agile Mindset

In my current position, I had the opportunity to interview a lot of developers. Some of them were very senior with years of experience and coming into the job with a resume that was stacked – amazing job titles, fascinating projects, the whole works. Others were green and inexperienced, with their biggest software project being a month or so in length. For the most part, experience didn’t really indicate whether someone had an agile mindset.

I never liked interviewing people, because I wasn’t one to enjoy interviews myself. I didn’t like the tricks that people asked, or the little riddles that they liked to solve. (I remember in one interview, someone asked me the default port number for MySQL. I knew the answer, but simple fact-based question like this don’t give much insight and it’s a hit or miss.)

Determining whether someone has the agile mindset is actually pretty simple. It doesn’t involve asking questions about the manifesto, or even common process oriented Scrum-lingo, like iterations or sprints or planning meetings. I used to ask a lot of yes or no questions, or questions that had very clear cut answers, but I quickly learned that these didn’t really give good insight into figuring out a developer’s skill set.

Rather, I found that the best way to determine if someone has an agile mindset is to just have a few minutes of open-ended conversation with them, and talk about how they would run a project if they were given full control, or how they work on hobby projects in their spare time.

I have a lot of developers who would often claim that they love agile development, and everything that it stands for, but when they talk about how they would like to develop software, they often start with an approach that doesn’t have much agility to it. It’s very documentation heavy, process oriented, and doesn’t really have much of the twelve principles, which some of them could recite by heart because they’ve memorized it. I’ve noticed that people who have the agile mindset tend to focus on getting working software as soon as possible, and everything is focused around that.

So from my limited anecdotal evidence of interviewing people, what I’ve noticed is that a lot of people have learned what developing with agility is, but they haven’t understand why they want to do it. Someone who has the agile mindset is someone who understands, believes and knows why they want to develop with agility, and will usually eagerly explain it to you.