program selection system

We do agile in Japan. To some extent, at least. In this presentation, I’m going to introduce you communities in Japan centered around agile. Those communities played (and are playing) very important role to spread agile in Japanese software industry. Early days, they have been the window to cutting-edge agile activities in US and Europa. Many people loved, say, XP and tried to practice just to hit hard on obstacles. Yet they bring their failures to communities and discussed to learn from it. Communities also held offline events to let people meet each other.

Well, I’m still gathering info about agile communities in Japan. I present them below. I’d rather hear whether you will be interested in this presentation and in what aspect. I’d love to adapt to reviewers’ comments.

I also hope to highlight some of the differences between Japanese agile and western agile. More on the differences, we submitted another session proposal, Agile In Japan: http://submissions.agile2008.org/node/3920

• XP-jp mailing list

One of the earliest (Feb. 2000) community started by Kenji Hiranabe. Hosted many hot discussions and reports of findings. Now quite silent (as many other mailing lists are.)

• XP Japan User Group (XPJUG)

Also quite old. Holding a few smaller (30-80 people) events per a year and one big (100-200) event called ‘XP MATSURI’ or XP Festa. Still very active with 1200+ valid mail addresses. There is Kansai (western part of Japan) branch and it’s also active.

A report of XP MATSURI 2006 (see the images) http://www.kumikomi.net/article/report/2006/24xp/01.html

• Object Club

Started as a group studying Object Oriented things and grown up to cover broader area. Held 9 big events (2 per a year) and several smaller ones. Past themes: Object Brain, Learns from failure in Object Oriented development, MIERUKA (visualization) and agile, Project Facilitation, worldcafe and lightning talks, Su-Ha-Ri, XFD (eXtreme Feedback Device which is a MIERUKA devices), Object Oriented returned. Started by Kenji Hiranabe and his colleagues.

• Project Facilitation Project

Community of people aiming to change software development from fields, people and really valuable processes. Not strictly agile but share common values.

• Agile Process Association

Community of companies (also accepts personal registration). Business oriented. Have several working groups including agile mind SIG.