I’ve just got back from Tokyo, where I was honoured to be invited to give the keynote at Agile Tokyo 2010. Agile conferences have a short history in Japan – both Agile Tokyo and Agile Japan are only two years old – and there was a real buzz of excitement, with lots of smart people (280 delegates attended) and interesting conversations. So first of all I’d like to thank Yoshi Nagase and his wonderful team at Technologic Arts for hosting me, Yoko Yoshikawa for taking such good care of me during my time there, Gihyo for organizing the conference and for inviting me, and my fellow presenters for some great discussions.
Agile Tokyo 2010 by Yoko Yoshikawa
The most surprising discovery for me was that agile is considered new and somewhat subversive in Japan. Japanese IT companies have been doing waterfall on large projects for a long time now, and it is deeply entrenched. Indeed, everybody I spoke to confirmed that waterfall worked perfectly well for them as a software development methodology. This was staggering to me, since outside Japan large software projects run with waterfall routinely go over budget and end up with either cuts in scope or poor quality – several recent reports, such as this one, put IT project failure rates in the range of 60-70%. This appears not to be the case in Japan – it is perhaps the only country that could make waterfall work reliably and repeatably. As my host, Yoshi Nagase, commented, this is deeply ironic in a country that created Toyota and lean manufacturing.
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Dave and I (Jez) have submitted the final draft of Continuous Delivery, and the people at Addison Wesley are aiming to have it published ready for Agile 2010.
There are going to be a number of talks on the content of the book this year.
Kent Beck, Timothy Fitz and I are doing a webinar on continuous deployment hosted by Alan Zeichick of SD Times. It’s at 1pm EDT on 30 June. You can sign up here.
I’m giving the keynote at Agile Tokyo 2010, which is on July 21.
Martin Fowler and I are doing a half-day tutorial on continuous delivery on Monday 9 August at Agile 2010. More details here.
Finally (for now), Martin and I will be doing a full day tutorial on continuous delivery at QCon San Francisco, 1-2 November. More details will follow here.
I look forward to seeing you at one of the events!
The book that Dave Farley and I have been working on for nigh on four years, Continuous Delivery, is finally up as a rough cut on Safari. I’m also very proud to announce that it has recently been accepted into Martin Fowler’s Signature Series. The book covers build and deployment automation, continuous integration, test automation, managing infrastructure and environments, configuration management, version control practices, data migration automation, and even governance. That’s a lot of material, and read like this it seems like a bit of a grab-bag of activities that normally gets second billing when you’re delivering software. However these turn out to be absolutely essential activities if you want to get high quality software into the hands of users as fast as possible, and then keep delivering them valuable new features1.
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