The DeveloperSummit was a free one day conference (in Japanese) for
developers held in Kobe, Japan. It is
nice to see more of these events taking place in Kansai rather than just in Tokyo.
This event was very popular with several of the sessions being completely full.
The keynote
presentation was from Oikawa Takuya, one of the Japanese developers on the Google
Chrome team. The main theme was the changes in project management style required
when developing for “the cloud.” Out is the old style product lifecycle with
releases every few years and in is the “versionless” development with very
frequent or “continuous” releases. Also,
the use of open source and the challenges that brings to development when
contributions from many people must be integrated. This was an interesting
presentation giving some insight into the how Google develops some of its
software and Chrome in particular.
The first
presentation on the “Agile” track was from a Microsoft evangelist entitled “Continuous
value delivery to the next decade.” This
presentation also discussed the differences between waterfall and agile
development and how development is done at Microsoft. However, the whole
presentation seemed like an advert for TFS. The main point seemed to be the
advantages of using a single tool for project management, bug tracking version
control etc rather than several different tools. And Microsoft just happens to
have such a tool. This seemed to me like agile for those who want to say they
are doing agile but don’t want to change too much. The process seemed to be
more like a series of mini-waterfalls backed up by comprehensive tools.
Following
the Google and Microsoft promotions we had an advertising spot for JIRA (the
bug tracking system from Atlassian) given by Suzuki Yusuke, an engineer from
Growth xPartners which seems to be an Atlassian
partner in Japan. This was less a less subtle promotion since the presenter even
included a price list for JIRA in one of the slides. After yet another
description of waterfall and agile processes (the third so far) the presenter
stressed the importance of collaboration and communication in Agile
development. I would not argue with
that, but I am sure that there is more to communication than a bug tracking
system. The middle part of the presentation described how “Agile is implemented
in the bug tracking system.” The idea seems to be to use JIRA to hold the list
of tasks to be done and to act as the communication medium for the team.
We use JIRA
as a bug tracking system and it seems to be one of the best bug trackers
available. However, I often see it as blocking rather than enabling communication.
Instead of direct communication between individuals, communication is via
comments on an issue. This leads to misunderstandings and delays. Also because
it is so easy to create an issue the “backlog” quickly becomes an unmanageable black
hole into which requests and improvement suggestions are sent to be forgotten.
I suppose
that not surprisingly, from a company selling the bug tracker there was no
suggestion that the use of a bug tracker is itself actually a symptom of a
bigger problem. A truly agile team would
probably have no use for a bug tracker.
The
presentation that I was most looking forward to was that by Wachi Yukei on “The
evolution of test driven development.” He is one of the translators of “GrowingObject Oriented Software Guided by Tests”, the Japanese version of which was
just released on the same day as the developer summit. This presentation gave
an overview of GOOS. The description of Mocks was fairly hard to follow and my
Japanese colleagues who were not familiar with mocks did not seem to understand
it at all. Actually the biggest problem
seemed to be the direct transliteration of English expressions into Japanese,
such as “walking skeleton.” This is not a problem for me as an English speaker –
in fact it makes it easier – but makes it hard for non-English speakers to
understand. However, the presentation did include a lot of good stuff from GOOS
such as the need for end-to-end tests and thin slices of functionality. I am
not quite sure on the relevance of the photo of David Cameron.
Many of the
presentations are on SlideShare (in Japanese)
Continuous
value delivery to the next decade:
Collaboration in enterprise development – how to connect the
development team with customers using JIRA
The
evolution of test driven development
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