Wednesday we visited NEC and Change Vision, both located in Tokyo. At those visits we got the chance to see one of the major Japanese corporations in the IT industry, as well a small software company.



We started out the day by visiting Change Vision, a company founded by Japanese author Kenji Hiranabe. We got a presentation of the two products of the company, JUDE and TRICHORD. Both seemed to be built on the idea of "mieruka" (making visible), which is a concept used by Japanese organizations for sharing information by making it visible in an easily understandable form.

While noticing the extensive use of simple visuals for tasks, metrics, ideas, releases and retrospectives, I have to admit what personally struck me the most was the bug-tracking system of Change Vision. It was visualized using LEGO bricks in a constrained physical space. This provides kanban-like control of the "bugs in process", by showing not only the variation in complexity of bugs, but also making it easy for everyone to see when you are running out of "slots" for new bugs, and thus have to start fixing some. Personally I just can't wait to try this visualization idea back home.

Judging by the discussions that took place after the visit, I think we all got a lot of inspiration from visiting a truly agile environment.

Later the same day we visited NEC for a techical presentation as well as a presentation focused on their development process. During the visit we learned that NEC had experimented with using Toyota Production System (TPS) a.k.a. Lean in the development process, for instance with the use of a kanban system to control the workload between different parts of the organisaion. Most surprisingly the system was put into place for controlling hand-offs between design, code, and test-phases. I think that as a group of agile thinkers, we were a bit stunned by this implementation.

NEC had also experimented with the TPS "stop-the-line" practice, in their development process, but had abandoned it due to inefficiency. Unfortunately we did not get a chance to hear the reasons that led to this conclusion.

(BestBrains getting a demonstration of Japanese innovation. This is an NEC electronic whiteboard with a built-in printer!)