Overall Agile 2007 was a great opportunity to be updated on the newest development within the Agile community and meet the people doing the groundwork
My version of the Conference had three themes:
- Large scale agile transitions.
- Distributed agile
- Lean thinking in software development
Whether these are the main themes for the industry also in the coming year, is hard to tell. I am though very sure they are not at all unsignificant, since so many papers and experience reports were about these topics
The two last days had a few very fun and rewarding moments. David Andersons informal presentation of his results from implementing a Kanban system in software development, was convincing and very, very interesting. I have followed David for some years, and he has come to lean at another route than e.g. Mary Poppendieck David is one of the big names in the FDD community and has also been heavily inspired by Eli Goldratt ("The Goal") and his thoughts. His book "Agile Software Management" is basically an application of Goldratts thoughts to software development.
What David could show us, was two concrete examples on applying lean thinking, in the form of a kanban to a system - thus limiting the Work In Process (WIP) and very soon get impressive results.
The one example was from an outsourced IT department from Microsoft. They had terrible results and an enormous backlog of work to do. By applying the kanban system they managed to bring down lead time and over some time completely eliminate the backlog.
The other example was from David's current work at Corbis - where he using the same principles has been able to stabilize their software delivery.
You can read more about David and his work at
http://www.agilemanagement.netFriday morning. Mary Poppendieck and Kenjii Hiranabe were leading a Discovery session titled: "Learn Kaizen from Toyota with Mindmaps"
As a big time mindmap fan it was great to see yet another application of this tool. The highlights of the session was 2 videos showing lean applications in practice. The first was a video from Toyota Motor Company, showing the history of Jidoka, also called Autonomation ~ "To add human intelligence to machines". That kind of thinking started when Sakichi Toyoda invented the automated loom that would stop by itself when a thread broke. The second video was even more fascinating. It showed a student of Taichii Ohno pupils coming to a Sanyo plant to help them improve productiviy by setting up work-cells and eliminating waste. Seeing changes being executed in real time in the video, while Kenjii was simultaneously translating was a great experience.
The mindmap part of the discovery session was, that each group after the video, would reflect and create group-mindmaps of what could be learned from the videos. Fun and good learning.
Kenjii Hiranabe has translated Mary Poppendiecks Lean Software Development and a number of other agile books. He has authored books on software development and has recently written a book on using mindmaps in software development. He is CEO of a company which are providing a tool to combine mindmaps and UML diagrams.
http://www.change-vision.comNow it is time for one weeks vacation, and I intend to be very silent on this site.
By Bent Jensen