On June 8, Kenji Hiranabe, president of Eiwa System Management Inc. (headquartered in Fukui City, Fukui Prefecture), gave a lecture titled "The Frontline of Agile Development: Creating Collaborative Teams between Business and Engineers" at the Kyoto Station Satellite Hall of Kyoto Computing Graduate Institute (KCGI), where he spoke passionately about the advantages of agile development and its frontline development status to students at KCGI's group school Kyoto Computer Gakuin.（Eiwa System Management is a company that specializes in agile development, and its subsidiary Afflel Inc. is a sponsor of the ET Robot Contest Kansai, which KCG and KCGI cooperate in organizing, where beginning and intermediate level engineers acquire planning and development skills through robot production.
Agile development is a method in which the business side and the development side work together to form a team, divide the work process into short cycles, and analyze, design, and implement the system to make it work.The most important parts of the system are selected and developed first, and then the users and developers work together to verify the system, exchange ideas, obtain feedback, and make improvements.It has been widely adopted in recent years as a method that overcomes the disadvantages of the traditional "waterfall" method of development, in which the design is carried out according to the initial specifications all the way to completion, such as long construction periods, difficulty in making design changes during the process, and unnecessary functions that are often left over as a result.In the lecture, he also introduced the recently popular "scrum" method of agile development, in which a team consisting of a "product owner," a "development team," and a "scrum master" who supports the team is working on the project.He also shared a behind-the-scenes story about the surprisingly effective analog management method of visualizing the flow and progress of work in the IT development field by pasting a piece of paper with each person's task written on it on a white board.Mr. Hiranabe concluded his speech by saying, "I hope that you will join the company with the enthusiasm to change the company, and that you will continue to propose and change things.Knowledge of agile development is a strong weapon in that case," he said, encouraging the students who are expected to play an active role in the IT industry in the future.
