Examining the Roots of Agile — interview article at InfoQ

InfoQ interview at Agile2011

At Agile2011, Kuroiwa-san, Kiro Harada, and I were interviewed by Shane Hastie at InfoQ, and it has been published recently as “Examining the Roots of Agile”.

Kuoiwa-san, has been my TSP sensei for long time.

The highlight to me was that he said that in software development world we were still missing the whole view. In this talk, the division of laber, silos of teams are mentioned,  but not only those. After this talk, he talked with Mary about the need of the big picture of software design in paper so everybody involved can see and walk through.

And I also liked my analogy. “Lean is like tomato juice. Extracted from tomato and made portable, while  TPS is the tomato itself with roots in the ground. It needs cultural and social soil, and without it, it cannot live long.”

Here are two links about Kuroiwa-san I wrote about.

•  I once wrote a blog etnry about TPS and him titled — “Think for yourself in your context” is the heart of Lean.
  Yes, it actually is too, in Agile.
• I invited him as a keynote speaker at AgileJapan2010 and did a panel discussion with Mary Poppendieck. It was fun he talked about Agile and Mary talked about TPS! Here’s a report.

Thanks Shane for the nice interview !

-Kenji