On day 3 we had not scheduled any visits, so I took of the day off buying some presents in Akihabara part of Tokyo (a.k.a. Electric City). In the afternoon I met with some of the participants at a Big Echo Karaoke-hotel. Who would have thought "We are the world" sung in a Tokyo basement could sound so beautiful?

Day 4 we visited DaiNippon Printing Ltd. At the factory tour of DaiNippon we saw how millions of japanese anime cartoons were printed, but most remarkably we saw how widespread the culture of using visual management in factories are. We had barely entered the factory, when I counted 13 * 3 meters of visuals on a wall. What to look for during maintenance with big pictures of how well-maintained equipment should look, defect statistics, and a lot of stuff I japanese (whích I can't read) that looked important. All of which helped employees do a better job.

By Sune Gynthersen

Yesterday Jesper and I was doing an agile workshop as part of the Öresund Agile 2008 conference in Malmö, Sweden. I have to admit we had set out being pretty ambitious about the content of the workshop. We stuffed everything from Release planning, charting, coding, test-driving, continuously integrating, doing reviews, retrospectives, scrum meetings, planning poker, and discussing engineering practices and process improvement into just one day. I think we can conclude the workshop fully lived up to it's name -- Accelerated Agile!

With Malmö filled with swedish football fans, students celebrating final exams, and of course a lot of skilled people from the agile software community, we had some great days. Not only was it cool doing the workshop itself, but being at a smaller software conference where you actually get a chance to chat with most of the attendees I think is really valuable. I hope everyone else enjoyed it as much as we did (in time the feedback forms will tell!).

As promised during the workshop, we have of course put the latest (and hopefully greatest) version of all the slides online. You can download them from here.

After browsing through the pictures that was taken during the day, I selected some that you'll find below.

Notice the red and green lava lamps in the background. These were controlled by the CruiseControl CI server! I personally think that this was actually more than just a gadget. It brought great visiblity into the project. With these lamps connected to the build system, everyone who entered the conference room (or even looked through the door) could immediately spot if there was currently a problem. Now that is TRULY surfacing problems fast!

The self-organizing team working towards a common goal?

Some laid back discussions of interesting engineering practices.

Our one-day iteration ended with a retrospective, that judging from the smiles were rather positive.

All sorts of important stuff on the wall. Tasks, burn-down, WIP chart, and standard work sheets.

A big thanks to all the dedicated attendees, conference coordinator Gustav Bergman from Softhouse who invited us in the first place, and also Sonny, Lars and Thomas Lundström who assisted us during the entire day!

By Sune Gynthersen

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!)

By Sune Gynthersen