Hello,

We started up Change Vision, Inc. this year, and it is almost the holiday season..

Today, I found an old mail to my friends(Agile Giants) that includes my thoughts, so pasted the paragraph to show my ambition.




...read more

I tried mind mapping of "Design Patterns" by GoF.
Colors and shapes strongly stimulate the right hemisphere of the cortex, and support human memory capability.

In this experiment, I used a new feature of JUDE/Professional 3.1 which adds a name to a link(dashed line between topics) to illustrate relationships between the patterns.

Get an evaluation license(if you don't have one), and try JUDE/Professional.
http://jude.change-vision.com/jude-web/product/professional.html

Today I talked with Matz("the" ruby language designer) in XP Fiesta 2006 Kansai and discussed for a few minutes commonality of Ruby and Agile. Both of us were invited yesterday as speakers of the fiesta.

Ruby is categorized as a light weight language, dynamic language or "P language(with long tail)". Agile software development approaches are also formerly called "Light Weight Methodologies", and changed its umbrella name to "Agile" so to directly express positive properties. Then why not call Ruby an "Agile Language?"

Matz pointed me to a Kikaineko's entry.
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/kikaineko/20060903

It's in Japanese, so I'm translating the points he made very briefly.

Agile software development values;
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

These four values can be translated as follows from the language viewppoint.

Languages should be human-oriented, human-friendly.
Languages should guide programmers to readable code
(as a substitution of document)
Language specification should be consistent and hospitable.
(collaboration of programmers and a language over contract between them)
Languages should embrace change.

He is a ruby programmer as well as a developer of Kikaineko-Mocker, a TDD tool which generates mock objects from tests.

Maz and I agreed that programming and software development are both "human activities" which affects each other. Agile and Ruby both value "having fun" in the activity as a Life-hack!

As I mentioned in the last entry, I've been catching a strong "social" commonality of agile and ruby communities in Japan.
http://jude-users.com/en/modules/weblog/details.php?blog_id=17

How about in the other area of the world ? Pragmatic Programmers likes Ruby a lot, and the pragmatic bookshelf series have good Ruby books, too.

After the Fiesta, I went for another drink with several rubists.

P.S.
Here's a wonderful XP Fiesta theme song, "Dear XP" and the movie!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpw8h4OGNxg

Here's a mind map of the "History of XP/Agile Books."

I picked up five BOI's; Addison-Wesley XP series, Agile Project Management Signature series, Pragmatic Bookshelf, Microsoft Professional, Prentice Hall, and Japan. In the XP-Fiesta I printed this mind map in a very large piece of paper and posted on the wall, and vote "which book do you like best" by dot stickers. Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt's "Pragmatic Programmers" got the most points, and Ruby books were popular.

A PDF of the mind map is here;
http://wiki.esm.co.jp/HistoryOfXPAgileBooksbyKenjiHIRANABE.pdf
(this inlcudes Japanese fonts... I'm not sure if its readable in your computers)

The above mind map is drawn by JUDE/Think!

Download
[JUDE/Think! 1.1.2 (for Windows)] 26,259KB
http://jude.change-vision.com/jude-web/files/jude-think-1_1_2-jre-setup.exe

[JUDE/Think! 1.1.2 (for MacOSX)] 9,875KB
http://jude.change-vision.com/jude-web/files/jude-think-1.1.2-MacOs.zip

Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres and their family visited our company Change Vision, Inc in their last visit to Japan! Here's a funny picture of them and our TRICHORD(our product, an Agile Getting-Project-Done tool) team. The left half(including Kent) is doing "X", and the right(including Cynthia) is doing "P."
Funny, isn't it !?

When we took pictures we said "Say Cheese", but Jojo(one of the daughters) said, "Stincky Socks", Why stincky socks !?

Book review - "Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great"

I really liked this book because it is the first book for retrospective practitioners in the Agile context with lots of insightes and tips in it!(Yes, of course, I like Norm Kerth's bible of Retrospectives, and Jean Takaba's Collaboration book, too. )

In this book, the author divides the session into five phases and provides concrete named activities for each phase(this is the greatest thing of the book).

In Agile Development Conference 2003 and 2004, I participated in Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns's retrospective workshop, and also Diana Larsen's and Rachel Davies's. And I remember Jean Takaba introduced to me Sam Kaner's wonderful facilitator's guide book. They are all in the bibliography of this book!

I attached a *personal* Mind Map of the book, please enjoy
(click to magnify)














*Click here to download the original .jude file.

For Japanese, try;
http://blogs.itmedia.co.jp/hiranabe/2006/08/agile_retrospec_e020.html

Here's a Mind Map of Jazz guitar chords of C major, for Ionian and Lidian modes.

The chords shapes are categorized into three branches based on the place(string #) of the root note(i.e. the "C" note). The fifth string and the forth string branches have "left" and "right" posistions depending on which side the fingers are placed according to the root note. Every branch spreads from a derivative of the primary chord form of CM7.

I'll do this thing for D minor 7th and G dominant 7th next time! D minor 7th will includes 9th, 6th. G dominant 7th will includes a lot of tensions like 9, 13 (natual) and b9, #9, #11, b13 (altered).











*Click Image to enlarge.
*Click here to download the original .jude file.

JUDE is a unique modeling tool which combines UML and Mind Maps.
Here, I wrote a technical paper of the background thoughts ...
Why UML and Mind Map, anyway ??

http://www.change-vision.com/en/UMLandMindMap.pdf

------------
Agile Modeling with Mind Map and UML

Abstract
Requirement Gathering or Gathering User Stories
(in Agile context) is always a challenging phase in
software development. There are no standard
processes or notations defined, In addition,
communication and facilitation skills are the primary
factor that makes the activity effective. In this paper, I
propose a new method for exploring Ŷser Wish¡¦
using Mind Maps and then model it using UML.
------------

We put up this paper on the wall of our JavaOne Pavilion booth and many engineers liked the concept, thank you !

What do you think ?

Change Vision, Inc. exhibited JUDE and TRICHORD(agile project dashboard) in JavaOne 2006.

There are 800 visitors to our booth and at least 300 saw our demonstration(I prepared only 300 T-shirts to give away to those who saw the demo), thank you very much.

Here are several topics I'd like to share with you.

1. "Kent Beck"(father of extreme programming) and Cindee(his wife) visited our booth and saw Mind Maps in JUDE. He said it was the most beautiful Mind Map tool, and Cindee said she liked the color.

2. In the Day3 general session, Erich Gamma(one of GoF, Eclipse lead, and JUnit pair programer of Kent) said that transparency, honesty, and project health are important to sustain a project. Our project dashboard product "TRICHORD" just designed to make project transparent and healthy. I should email to Erich Gamma!
http://trichord.change-vision.com/

3. "Artima developer" visited our booth to audio record my message.
http://www.artima.com/lejava/articles/javaone_2006_tue_ideas.html
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Kenji Hiranabe, CEO of Change Vision, Inc., discusses the advantages of having developers push status to managers, rather than having managers pull status from developers. (3:11)
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I just came home from JavaOne. wow, it is Sunday...
And my birthday was yesterday.