News

Software Engineering Conference in Russia (SECR) is one of the brightest annual IT events in the country. The 13th edition of the SECR will take place on October, 20-22 in Saint-Petersburg and the conference program will include a key-note address by IJI Chairman Dr. Ivar Jacobson.

Many organizations don’t realize they are in a method prison. It is easy to understand why not. They have not identified any problems because they haven’t seen how it could be different than today. The problems are too abstract without a solution to them. Once upon the time users didn’t know that software should be built using components, e.g. java beans. Similarly, they didn’t know they needed use cases or user stories to capture requirements. And so on. However, once they got it, and started to use it, they saw the value. Similarly, once they see that they can have access to a global library of practices, which are continuously improved, and from which they can select their own method, they won’t go back to what we have today.

Essence is instrumental in moving software development toward a true engineering discipline.

"I am excited about working with industry partners at SEMAT and leveraging the ESSENCE standard", said Scott Ambler in a recent phone interview, " in order to not just have different types of re-usable domain content built up for use as accelerators in Disciplined Agile Delivery projects, but also to clearly guide the industry on the benefits of specific granular practices that are currently uniquely only present within the Disciplined Agile Delivery method.”

Key takeaways in article: *What issues can SEMAT help address within an organisation. *What is the best way to train people in the use of SEMAT so that its understood and used. *Why are the SEMAT cards important? *How can SEMAT be applied to the Enterprise, Programmes and Projects. *How can the use of SEMAT be scaled out across your organisation.

Use cases have been around for almost 30 years as a requirements approach and have been part of the inspiration for more-recent techniques such as user stories. Now the inspiration has flown in the other direction. Use-Case 2.0 is the new generation of use-case-driven development—light, agile, and lean—inspired by user stories and the agile methodologies Scrum and Kanban. Use-Case 2.0 has all the popular values from the past—not just supporting requirements, but also architecture, design, test, and user experience—and it is instrumental in business modeling and software reuse.

Within Nederlandse Spoorwegen / Dutch Railways (NS) we were struggling with the question of how to get from high level system requirements (features/epics) to the right level of specification to enable agile development. User stories were not a viable option for us as they provided too little information with too little context. Use-Case 2.0 is still a use case but its application has evolved. Use cases are "sliced up" to provide stories or scenarios for agile iterative development, which delivers lightweight stories to our outsourced development team just in time for development while providing NS with the big picture view to support the entire product lifecycle. This article describes how we made the transition from large use cases which were completely written before development to Use Case 2.0 and why this helps us to deliver apps faster and with the right business value.

Ivar Jacobson International today released a starter pack of agile practice cards that aid team-based software development by ensuring that core agile team practices are transparent and effective. Each practice contains a small number of cards that provide useful, structured advice on how to apply the practice. In many organizations, arguments rage between software development "experts" and teams on which process framework is best - e.g. Extreme Programming (XP) versus Scrum versus Kanban. Even though agile principles are clear that "no one should tell the team how to do their work", in practice they are often told "Do Scrum" or "No, don't do Scrum, do Kanban!". The Agile Essentials eliminates these damaging and distracting conflicts by extracting the useful practice guidance from XP, Scrum, Kanban and other popular agile approaches, and presents it as a useful and usable set of practice cards that development teams can freely select, combine and adapt to help them work effectively as a team.

While many organizations have turned to agile as a way to streamline their development processes, the road to successfully implementing agile is bumpy. For organizations who want to achieve and maintain a sustainable agile transformation long-term, Ivar Jacobson, founder and chairman of Ivar Jacobson International, and Ian Spence, head of research and development at Ivar Jacobson International, shed some light on how to do that.

The Object Management Group® (OMG®), an international, open membership, not-for-profit technology standards consortium, released a new case study detailing Munich RE's successful application of the Essence standard with guidance provided from Ivar Jacobson International (IJI).