What is a Guild in Agile?

Guild is an organization of people who do the same job or have the same interests such as the Writers’ Guild, the Fashion Designers’ Guild.

Cambridge Dictionary

In Agile, there are many ways to organize people like tribe, chapter, squad and guild for different aspects. As stated in dictionary definition above, the key point for a guild is the common interest among it members. The term guild is linked to being a craftsman. A specific focus and continuing goal is a must for an agile guild. In a guild which is an organic and wide-reaching “community of interest”, people are willing to share their knowledge, methodologies, best practices, tools, designs, and code.

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

On the other hand, we have one more term “Center of Excellence” (CoE), which is similar to guild and sometimes might be confused with guild. CoE is a group of people with specialized skills and expertise whose job is to provide leadership and promote/share knowledge within the organization. While CoE is work-related, guild is interest driven. Moreover, a CoE is often purposefully created by an organization with funded members whose full-time job is.

What is the goal of Guild?

The goal of a Guild is to become better craftsman and increase the knowledge of the people who attend the guild. This can be done by discussing new…