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Ivar Jacobson and Alistair Cockburn announce an Essence partnership

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Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) and Alistair Cockburn | Humans and Technology Inc. announce an Essence partnership

Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) and Dr. Alistair Cockburn | Humans and Technology Inc. are delighted to announce a partnership to describe and raise awareness for Hexagonal Architecture based on the Essence standard.

The Essentialized practices will be added to the ever-growing Essence based practice eco-system, giving organizations and teams even more flexibility as they select a way of working that is right-sized for them. The Essence and practice based approach is revolutionizing the way that the industry thinks about and presents development ‘methods’. Essence provides the architectural ‘glue’ that is helping organizations to treat development more and more as an efficient engineering discipline rather than a cottage industry or craft. Read more about the values and use cases of Essence in Ivar’s recent article “Essence, the Standard Common Ground, in a Nutshell”.

Image showing some cards from the Hexagonal Architecture Practice

Hexagonal Architecture: Allow an application to equally be driven by users, programs, automated test or batch scripts, and to be developed and tested in isolation from its eventual run-time devices and databases. Formally called ‘Ports & Adapters’ pattern.

Hexagon: Hexagonal (ports and adapters) architecture uses a hexagon to visually highlight:

  • the inside-outside asymmetry and the similar nature of ports, and
  • the presence of a defined number of different ports – usually two, three, or four.

It is not a hexagon because the number 6 is important, but rather to allow the people doing the drawing to have room to insert ports and adapters as they need, not being constrained to a one-dimensional layered drawing and all that evokes.

Looking at the screen of my laptop, I realized that it was full of code that didn’t let me understand what it did regarding business logic. From that moment I began to search until I discovered the architecture that decouples the business logic from the frameworks: Hexagonal Architecture, more correctly called Ports & Adapters. From that moment until now, I haven’t stopped reading and learning about this pattern.

said Alistair Cockburn, CEO of Humans and Technology Inc.

My collaboration with Ivar Jacobson International to leverage the Essence Industry standard allows me to capture in a simple engaging way, the key elements of the Hexagonal Architecture practice enabling people to easily use this thinking in collaboration with other complementary practices. The more Architects that know about and consume this practice, the better the industry will be.
Alistair and I have worked together many times over our careers, the most recent of which has been our work on Use Cases, the Use-Case Foundation. Alistair’s contributions to our industry over the years have been huge and I am delighted to have his latest thinking on Hexagonal Architecture as part of the ever growing practice eco-system available for practitioners to leverage to improve the way they develop products.

said Ivar Jacobson, CEO of Ivar Jacobson International.


About Ivar Jacobson: Dr. Ivar Jacobson is “a Father in Software Engineering” as his contributions span over 50 years starting from components and architecture in 1968 and still ongoing today with Essence, a common ground for engineering. In between he created Use Cases, and co-created UML and the Rational Unified Process. His influential software products include Objectory (that became RUP), the award-winning intelligent agent tool, Waypointer, and right now Essence WorkBench. Learn More.

About Alistair Cockburn: Dr. Cockburn is a world expert on agile methodologies and use cases, internationally recognized for his expertise in project management and object-oriented design.

  • Co-author of the Agile Manifesto.
  • Voted in 2007 one of the “All-Time Top 150 i-Technology Heroes.”
  • Named in 2020 as one of the “42 Greatest Software Professionals of All Times.” Learn More.

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