I was just watching a presentation by Kenji Hiranabe on Toyota's product development.

In the presentation, Kenji talks about meeting a Toyota Chief Engineer, Mr. Nobuaki Katayama. Now, Toyota's management culture has been the topic of an increasing number of articles and talks over the past few years within the agile software development community. One of the things that many such presentations have pointed out (myself included) is Toyota's appreciation for skill and craftsmanship.

Kenji's presentation about Mr. Katayama, the Chief Engineer for Toyota Supra, Lexus SC and others, includes a very illustrating example of how this shows - Mr. Katayama designed manual transmission systems for 18 years before becoming a Chief Engineer.

18 years.

That's quite different from what we're used to in so many organizations in the western world where it's commonplace to have product managers and other senior management without any clue whatsoever regarding what it takes to build such a product. It is most unfortunate that we have this dominant model where people with an MBA and a pure management background are considered prime candidates to lead a product development organization. In practice, that often leads to sub-par products that are managed by cost and sales rather than by quality and value delivered to the user.

Too few of these organizations' managers seem to truly care about the products they're building nor do they seem to understand how those products are built.

In his keynote speech at Agile 2008, "Uncle" Bob Martin proposed a fifth value to the Agile Manifesto:

Craftsmanship over crap.

I have an addition, too.

Ownership over authority.

Another quote I heard while in Toronto (paraphrasing):

Q: What do you call requirements that are not executable?
A: Specifiction.

This must be the best quote I wrote down during the Agile 2008 conference.

Q: How do you know you've got technical debt?
A: Your state machine implementation has a state named UNKNOWN.

I've been hinting at this for so long in the various agile conferences around the world, most recently last week at Agile 2008, and now it's public.

The first Scandinavian Agile Conference will take place in Helsinki on October 29, 2008. That's two and a half months from now, there's limited seats, and the registration is now open so go check out the amazing line-up and sign up - I did already!

Oh, and there's plenty of opportunity in the open space track to discuss the very issues that are relevant to you right now.

And if you're wondering about the name, this conference is indeed targeted at the international community, all sessions will be in English, and I'm hoping to see many new faces!

This is something I've lost sleep for the past couple of nights, having a day job and everything :)

If you're not "in the know", Assembly is the oldest, largest and best LAN party in the world, with thousands of people packing up their screens, computers, speakers, sleeping bags, and two boxes of energy drinks, gathering into a huge arena for three straight days and nights, playing multiplayer computer games, chatting and hacking. The roots are in the demo scene - people used to pull off some real magic with the old Amigas, Ataris and Commodores!

It's been many, many years since I last visited Assembly but this year I got a chance to participate in a somewhat different way. Enter Megascreen.

Megascreen is essentially a huge group of computers collaborating to render a video into a massive screen, each computer screen serving as a single pixel. The video resolution was set to 75 x 13 so that we could utilize all the computer places on the arena floor, effectively rendering the video on 975 screens (minus dead pixels - not everybody participated) in two directions, totaling almost 2000 screens altogether (minus the dead pixels).

We had a mixed team of people for pulling together video, sound and the technology to play them in sync on thousands of screens. Jukka Lindström, a colleague at Reaktor and myself took care of the technical implementation, Lauri Warsta from Las Palmas Films created the animation, and Mete Ufacik from Ufacik Partners produced the whole thing. While for me and Jukka the Megascreen was mainly an exciting project and experiment in environmental art, the actual video we were playing was a commercial for N-gage, part of their Get Out And Play campaign, and Nokia naturally sponsored the project.

If you were there, great! If you weren't, you can try and get your share of the experiment through some video clips available on Youtube or check out the one below. It has the original video embedded so you can compare :)

Even though there are a lot of dead pixels (people build all kinds of "obstacles" on their computer places, including two-meter speakers, tents and what not), I feel freaking awesome about the outcome.

We did it!