Agile China 2010 by ThoughtWorks - Watershed Moment for China CIOs

BEIJING, Oct. 20 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- The Fifth Agile Software Development Conference, hosted by ThoughtWorks was successfully held on October 15, attracted more than 600 Agile enthusiasts. Different from previous conferences, the participants in this year's Conference consisted of a higher percentage of people from top management from enterprises. ThoughtWorks founder, Roy Singham, kicked off the Conference with ThoughtWorks Chief Scientist and Agile Manifesto founder, Martin Fowler. Global lean software leaders, Mary Poppendieck, and James Grenning, one of the other Agile Manifesto founders, shared the latest international studies and interests in the field of Agile. While industry leaders, such as China Mobile, Shanghai Bell, Baidu and Nokia-Siemens, shared the far-reaching reform on software design, development, testing and engineering management of the last ten years, since the birth of Agile, as well as what they thought regarding the essence of the latest practices of Agile, with the participants.

ThoughtWorks Founder delivered the opening speech proclaiming that Agile has started to have a deep influence on the top management of Chinese enterprises

On October 14, Roy Singham, as the founder of ThoughtWorks, the leading Agile enterprise worldwide, as well as the forerunner in promoting Agile in China, delivered his wonderful opening speech for the Conference, summarizing three development stages of Agile's history: Extreme Programming (XP) dominance, (Agile) process improvement represented by ThoughtWorks, and the influence on management thinking and mode.

He thought that Agile had developed faster than was originally imagined by the industry, and that constantly innovative development of software in China would create the opportunity for China to become the leading strength in the history of the Agile software revolution. Roy pointed out that the promotion of Agile in China has had deep influence on the top management of the enterprises and organizations, such as China Mobile, Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba and Nokia-Siemens, who have started paying close attention, so as to actively influence the development of Agile in the management and cultures of their organizations.

Wonderful speeches of international masters shared authoritative directions of Agile research

The keynote speech "Software design mode in the 21st century" from ThoughtWorks Chief Scientist and software development master, Martin Fowler, centered on "the core of Agile software development, and the necessity of Agile development". He analyzed in-depth the contents of adaptive schedule and predictive schedule during software development process as well as the difference in efficiency, as well as the new development stage from continuous integration to continuous delivery for Agile practitioners.

Martin Fowler shared his ideas on the latest trend of model analysis, reconstruction and Extreme Programming (XP).

Lean is the hot topic in current software R&D. Therefore the keynote speech of global lean software leader, Mary Poppendieck, naturally attracted double the attention. She compared the actual operation effectiveness between Terminal 5 of Heathrow Airport and Terminal 3 of Beijing Airport by means of data available. Different from the terminal of Heathrow Airport, the terminal at Beijing Airport is in good order, which is dependent on the perfect process of the baggage handling system in Beijing Airport. Mary Poppendieck pointed out that relevant social factors shall be considered during software development, and only when the software system is considered a social technological system, and full consideration taken of the relationship between software and humans, can the best results be achieved. In addition, Mary Poppendieck shared what she thought about the realization of effectiveness and a longer lasting change.

The keynote speech of senior embedded development expert, James Grenning, is "Test Driven Development", in which he pointed out that the nature of software testing is not the game to find defects. He thought that software (the finished product) is very fragile and that sole dependence on manual testing is impracticable because newly developed code and the change of the completed code will result in new defects. At the same time, James Grenning highlighted the critical significance of unit tests once again, and interpreted new TDD mode from a brand new perspective.

Senior Agile expert and bestselling author, Jean Tabaka, in the keynote speech "12 success modes in the Agile application", shared her views by centering on system thinking, typical Agile application failure model, Agile organization transformation, the necessity to learn from lean thinking and scenario simulation.

The industry leaders, such as China Mobile, Baidu and Nokia-Siemens, shared their practical experience with Agile

As the benchmark of software reform of the mobile industry in China, China Mobile Research Institute successfully used Agile practice in its Large Cloud R&D Project. China Mobile Research Institute Director, Zhang Weimin, shared with the participants his experience and thoughts on Agile applications during Large Cloud R&D with his wonderful speech entitled "12 Agile 'Military Rules' boost China Mobile Cloud Plan". He Mian from Shanghai Bell shared the difficulties, solutions and enlightenment during the Agile transformation process, providing useful experience for the transformation of large organizations. Song Jinyong, the driver of Agile development in Baidu, a bellwether Chinese Internet enterprise, shared the active influence of Agile on project management and product R&D by means of internal driving and top-down introduction of Agile within Baidu in his keynote speech "Agile journey of Baidu", explaining in-depth the complete concept of Product Backlog Grooming and how the detailed technology has helped the organization with better implementation of iterative development. Alibaba introduced active improvement of the R&D team using Agile thinking to the participants.

The new feeler for the application of Agile in China is created, and lean thinking becomes the highlight of this Conference

International lean master, Mary Poppendieck, quoted several cases to share the important role of lean thinking for the Agile practice in enterprises and organizations, sparking off active discussions and great responses. The speech "How far Agile is" delivered by Agile consultant, Xiong Zichuan, of ThoughtWorks pushed the discussion of lean topics to the climax. The cases provided by Xiong Zichuan analyzed the lean genes behind the Agile projects, for which he made use of various data to analyze the wastage and low efficiencies in conventional software development mode, and analyzed three pillars of lean genes, that is, eliminating waste, constant improvement and human-orientation, with cases in which ThoughtWorks helped customers in practicing lean thinking. In the end, he emphasized that Agile is not a simple tool kit, and that only the Agile team with lean genes can walk forward along the Agile road. This will serve as a very important reference for Chinese enterprises.

ThoughtWorks successfully held the Fifth Open Agile Conference as a celebration of the tenth anniversary of Agile

This Conference was held on the tenth anniversary of the Agile Campaign, and was an open conference organized by ThoughtWorks, where the topics and formats of the Conference and the contents of every lecture were reviewed by industry colleagues, after having collected the most representative voices from within the industry and communicated them to the IT community in China, thus fully reflecting the latest development of Agile practice in China and foreign countries. This Conference was an unprecedented success as a perfect celebration of the tenth anniversary of Agile. Over time, ThoughtWorks has paid constant attention to new technologies, providing constant innovative thinking for software development in China by combining the experience of helping the World's Top 500 Enterprises with Agile development, and successfully bringing the Agile China Conference to China for five consecutive years. As a technology guiding force, ThoughtWorks is serving the IT software reform in China by constantly consulting and re-organizing the industry's strengths and resources, and guiding the Chinese IT industry to create a healthy ecological environment. The success of the Fifth Agile China Conference shows us that the Chinese Agile community has grown mature by actively answering the call, participating in the hosting of the conference, so that the Agile China Conference became a real platform for "speaking out" for Agile practitioners and enthusiast, thereby driving the promotion and application of Agile in the IT industry in China, which will in turn guide the large reform of IT software development in China, and improve the overall productivity of software development in China.