In my experience, one valuable skill that I’ve brought to the software development process is one that nobody wants to talk about: the willingness and ability to do tedious tasks that nobody else wants to do. Manual testing is the first such task that comes to people’s minds, but another example is going through the defect system on a regular basis to ensure that all defects have the proper data.
The good news is that agile has lowered the value of this skill. For one, making sure that processes, such as defect tracking, are followed is a team responsibility. Therefore, team members are more likely to do the right thing without being audited and the pain of bookkeeping lapses is felt more by the entire team.
More importantly, however, with agile there are simply fewer repetitive, tedious tasks. There is no process-for-process’ sake, so processes such as defect tracking workflows are reduced to the absolute minimum to make them work, and if they aren’t serving their intended purpose, they are adjusted based on feedback from the sprint retrospective. And since the pain of repetitive tasks are felt more by the whole team, there’s a greater emphasis on removing or automating as many such tasks as possible.