I led a session with Mary Poppendieck in Agile2007.
"Learning Kaizen from TOYOTA [with Mind Maps]"





We set two objectives.

To explore what Agile can learn from TPS.
To learn how to use mind maps to simulate group innovation.

And we show the audience short videos of Jidouka, and Yatai,
then explored using group mind mapping commonalities and differences
between Agile and TPS.

Here's my session presentation slides;
http://www.change-vision.com/files/kenji.hiranabe/LearningKaizneFromToyotaWithMindMaps.pdf
And the results !

The forth video of the six.

Adenda

Part 4: Open process, open framework, and open language
4-1: Agile as an Open Process
4-2: Rails, a web application framework
4-3: Unit testing and testing frameworks
4-4: Ruby as a DSL
4-5: A predicatable change is not a change.
4-6: Convention over Configuration, or Rails application as a big configuration file.

Kevin Tate's book
Sustainable Software Development - An Agile Perspective
http://www.amazon.com/Sustainable-Software-Development-Agile-Perspective/dp/0321286081/

I really like the title! I've been thinking that software development and software itself should be sustainable and constructed not like a "building" but like Sagrada Família. Kent Beck also said that software development is more like "gardening".

Kevin introduces four principles in a juggling metaphore.
Quote:

The four principles are;

* Working Product
* Design Emphasis
* Defect Prevention
* Continual Refinement

All of them have been stated in the context of Agile, but the viewpoint of "sustainability" is worth reading.


Here's a mind map of my book review. Click to magnify or here's one in PDF format.
http://www.change-vision.com/files/kenji.hiranabe/SustainableSoftwareDevelopment-Review-Kenji.pdf

Jim Highsmith gave a good foreword.

This time, we talk about Rubyishness.

3: Rubyishness
3-1: What makes Ruby Rubyish ?
3-2: What Ruby does and doesn't inherit from Lisp
3-3: Lisp, Python, and Ruby

the original article is at;
http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/im/carc/serial/ruby_agile03/ruby_agile03.html

The second video of our "Ruby x Agile" discussion series, by Matz, Kakutani-san, and, me.

Agenda
Part II: Resonance of Business-Process-Framework-Language, why ?
Section 2-1: Focus-Shift from CPU power to Human power
Section 2-2: Agile and Market meet

Matz says "Shift from machine-performace to human-performance."
And that's what I think Agile and Ruby meet.

The first video is at;
http://jude-users.com/en/modules/weblog/details.php?blog_id=28

The original article is published from Atmark IT.
http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/im/carc/serial/ruby_agile02/ruby_agile02.html

In RubyKaigi2007 Day2, PragDave talked "I love Ruby."

I'm not a Rubyist myself, but I have a lot of friends in the Ruby community in Japan. When I wrote my article "Scripting Java" in DDJ(Doctor Dobb's Journal Japan), I looked at Shugo Maeda's demi(Ruby bridge of Java) in 1998. And since 2000, I have been seeing Suketa Masaki who wrote "256 times Ruby" and Masar Ishii who introduced XP, Patterns and Principles of Object-Oriented design to Japan(and passed away in the terrible traffic accident in Kobe). And I'm also the boss of Kakutani Shintaro who translated Bruce Tate's "From Java To Ruby." So I'm connected to the Japanese Ruby community socially. This time, I participated in the Kaigi as a lightening talker.

Anyway,


I had a very important expericence in RubyKaigi2007.
Dave Thomas who played an important role in the Ruby AND Agile community in the U.S(Matz, shintaro and I talked about this), talked to us very nicely, honestly, and seriously in his keynote speech.


Here's his story. It was pretty simple.

• I love Ruby. To love your tool is important.
  
• Ruby is like your children.
  
• He is a teenager and changing socially.
  
• He is dating with JRuby, IronRuby, ...
  
• Parents give advice (when asked).
  
• Don't forget Ruby's values.
  
  
  
  • Be nice to developers
    
  • Be clear and readable
    
  • Be flexible and agile
    
  • Be open
    
  
  
• The most important thing is this community.
  

In the last minutes of the talk, he showed a lot of pictures of people's faces, taken during the conference for that two days, happy faces, serious faces, tired(and taking a nap) faces of staff and participants. It was like a rush of scenes of kissing in "Cinema Paradiso."

And he concluded;

• I came to thank you, and I feel at home.
  

We gave him a standing ovation and he also raised his hands and applaused to us. Aactually, we "shared" the standing ovation.

A more detailed log is here.
http://jp.rubyist.net/RubyKaigi2007/Log0610-S5.html

I attended RubyKaigi2007.

I have a chance to talk with PragDave. I showed him my new book("Mind mapping for better software development"), and asked for a chance to publish it from his Pragmatic Bookshelf series.

And I took part in the lightening talks!

My talk is titled "Software development is made of ideas and communication." to show good match between Ruby and Agile.

I tried a new style of presentation using camera, pens and paper.

** Update **
The second video is here;
http://jude-users.com/en/modules/weblog/details.php?blog_id=32
************

Matz(The designer of Ruby Language), Kakutani-san(Japanese translator of Bruce Tate's "From Java To Ruby") and I had a discussion titled "Ruby multiplied by Agile".

We wanted to explore the relationship between Ruby and Agile, and why.
My goal is to show that "Business-Process-Framework-Language" can be instanciated as "Web2.0-Agile-Rails-Ruby" in a very synergetic manner, but each of the three may have other goals

This series is divided into six movies and the first one has just released! Let's enjoy.

Here's the original article in "AtmarkIT".
http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/im/carc/serial/ruby_agile01/ruby_agile01.html


Although the discussion is in Japanese and we are Japanese, I added English telop so that you (the west) can understand ;-P

Here's the three.

NaCl Fellow Yukihiro matsumoto	Change Vision, Inc. CEO Kenji HIRANABE	Eiwa System Management, Inc. Service Providing Div. Programmer Shintaroh Kakutani

(By the way, Pragmatic Dave is visiting Japan in RubyKaigi2007 soon.
http://jp.rubyist.net/RubyKaigi2007/english.html)

To answer frequently asked questions,

"Are there any links between XP(Extreme Programming) and Patterns?"

Ralph Johnson says,

"there are VERY strong social connections"

http://www.objectclub.jp/community/XP-jp/xp_relate/xp_patterns
So I tried to make the connection visible.

There are several referers to our site from an interesting research which studies use of Mind Maps in software development.

http://eric-blue.com/blog/2006/12/mindmapping_and_the_software_d.html

Interesting!

Now I'm preparing a book(Japanese, sorry) of Mind Mapping in software development. I'll be published in Feb, next year!

-Kenji