Yesterday was a really long day, and I have to admit I was to tired to write a blog entry. So here is the field report from day 2 of our Lean study tour. To be completely honest with you - I felt incredibly privileged about what I experienced in Nagoya yesterday. First we visted Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology and the Motomachi plant like Jesper mentioned in his earlier blog entry - I would definitely recommend both to anyone visiting Japan.

After the plant tour we met Mr. Satoshi Ishii who is a project general manager at the BR Automotive Software Engineering Dept. within Toyota. In short, these guys are doing all sorts of software that is embedded in modern Toyota/Lexus cars. Satoshi Ishii explained to us that a modern Lexus (Toyota's luxury brand) contains 70 or more ECUs (electronic control units) which all needs software (brakes, engine, fuel injection, navigation, adaptive cruise control, etc.) along with the ability to communicate with each other.

Before the meeting I was a little skeptical - Were the Toyota culture so strong that it had found its way into the relatively new field of software development? What might surprise some, was that they were using a waterfall model (in Ishii-san's own words - in reality I think it was more like the spiral model). In spite of that, I had a feeling afterwards that I had just talked to perhaps the most skilled software development managers I have ever met! Does that sound like a paradox? I do not think so.

Let me explain it this way. I once said to myself that I did not want to waste my time as a developer on non-agile projects. In the Toyota case, I would certainly make an exception. Why? Because I believe that the principles that this company is built upon is of far greater importance than any of the agile pratices that we spent so much time on in the Western world.

After meeting Mr. Ishii, I had a talk with Mary Poppendieck (who is also with us on this study tour) and she believed that this was actually the first time a Toyota manager in software development has ever spoken publicly about how they apply their (Lean) philosophy in this field - I almost had the goose bumps

Trust me... I will write more about the all the learnings of this meeting - but now it is time for preparing a presentation for the Agile Japan group tomorrow.

By Sune Gynthersen