I present agile practices—KPT, Estimate Retrospectives, Positive Strokes, Iteration Planning, Darts, Task Kanban, and Overtime Tickets—that I have actually practiced in a project where I worked as a Technical Lead. I also discuss the benefits and careful points we experienced when implementing these practices from the viewpoint such as team building and leader’s mind-set.

“None of the number of people, technology nor a power of money will complete this construction after all. It is the people’s feelings which we can only rely on.”

Gathering and writing “User Stories” is always a challenging activity and interview skills are the primary factor that makes the activity effective. In this session, I propose a method for exploring “User Wish” — user’s vague ideas before shaping user stories — using semi-structured interview with mind maps. The former half of the session is an introduction of mind maping and how to use it in user story exploration. The latter half will be a demonstration and workshop of attendees.

• What is a Mind map and Why ?
• How Software Development Benefits from Using Mind Maps

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.

Summary

BUG-LEGO is a practice to build a tiny structure which is representation of a software bug. Those are build with LEGO blocks and placed in the team’s workspace. LEGO bricks are represented as the priority, dependency, difficulty of software bugs by developer. It is a kind of information radiator.

BUG-LEGO has three benefits.

1. Intuitive visualization of the quantity of software bugs for everyone.
2. Changing mindset of developer from negative to positive against software bugs.
3. Providing the physical constraint of the building plate.

Material

A Japanese band would like to sing a song about Agile at the banquet party. The song is called “Dear XP” and quite well-known in Japanese XP and Agile communities.

Watch this 3-minute movie! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpw8h4OGNxg

I realized for the first time the true strength of human collaboration. Two chairs next to each other but one computer together watching flowing clouds and the source code

XP Dear XP On the wall we remember the task cards the team strugled with in the summer days

Nobuaki Katayama, Chief Engineer of Lexus/SC and IS, talked to software engineers about process, principles, and practices of new car development in Toyota, at Developer’s Summit 2008 in Tokyo on Feb. 13, 2008. In this session, I’ll give his presentation, translated into English in place of him. It starts with CE Katayama’s introduction, explains management principles and practices of a huge car development project, and concludes with people side of the development. I add some episodes about Agile and engineering found during our pannel session of the conference.

I will present examples of process improvement (Kaizen) in factories in Japan, demonstrate how the Toyota Production System (TPS) constantly improves the way things are done to meet changing customer needs, involving wokrplace(Gemaba) people. After presentation of key TPS concepts, small groups will explore commonalities between Agile and TPS by developing Mind Maps, and then exchange the results. Note that this is a re-run of the same program at Agile2007, presented by Mary Poppendieck and Kenji Hiranabe(me). This time, the content is shortened, focusing on the best stories.