Key traits of a software leader - Personal Excellence, Integrity, Innovation, and Technology Evangelism

•  Personal Excellence

Software is continuously evolving and so must software professionals evolve. Find ways to continue to grow. There are numerous ways, including podcasts, books, blogs, meetups, technical conferences, code camps, and innovation challenges. Find a couple that fit your interest and style. Use resources like github and stack overflow to learn and experience other approaches to writing code and solving problems.

Leaders develop well-thought-out, well-architected, and well-tested software. Make everything you write something that you would feel comfortable publishing to open-source. and others on the team will emulate your style, template from your code, and learn from you.

• Integrity

Integrity is an important quality often overlooked in soft-skills discussions. Yet, integrity is arguably one of the most important aspects of leadership in any field. Never do anything unprofessional at work our outside of work with any of your colleagues. Treat all members of the team with respect and consideration...always. If you disagree with someone you should always make your voice heard, but your voice should be the voice of logic and reason, not the voice of emotion and ego. You don't need to be loved by everyone on the team but it helps to be well-liked, and you need to be highly respected.

Apply this integrity to your work ethic. You should provide aggressive schedule estimates that you can achieve with high confidence. You shouldn't have hidden agendas. Make choices and recommendations that are best for the team and organization. If this doesn't align with your goals, choose another team or organization that does.

•  Innovation

Innovation is perhaps one of the most difficult traits to learn. For an existing problem, it is easy to get caught up in what is familiar and to fit problems to existing toolsets and skills that you have always developed. Try to push beyond what is comfortable and known. Allocate some time before jumping into any task to thinking about what might be the best solution for your problem. Do this before providing schedule estimates.

Innovation also extends well beyond solving existing problems. Look around at the expertise of your group and your company. Periodically step back and think about other things that your group or company could invest in that would be a good fit for the company. Discuss some of these ideas with your manager or product manager and track them somewhere appropriate at your company, such as a wiki. If you strongly believe in your idea, don't be afraid to champion it or even spend some of your own time to develop a prototype.

•  Technology Evangelism

A strong leader will keep abreast of software technologies and advocate adoption within the team where appropriate. This should not become an exercise in constantly adopting the newest "hot" technology. Look for technologies which will improve the development cycle of your team. Would TDD improve the readability and maintainability of your team's code? Do you  have a complex system with frequent threading issues? Would a functional programming language improve the quality of your system? What about your revision control, bug tracking, and/or life-cycle tracking systems? Could your team benefit from improvements to these areas? Consider cost. Some of the best solutions are free. Remember that everything your team does is to improve the bottom line of the company. Often this is indirect and hard to quantify. Examples are investments in test, design, and architecture, which rarely benefit time-to-market, but often have a solid payoff in maintenance costs and ability to evolve the software over the lifetime of the product. Where possible, frame your recommendations in terms of cost savings.