Articles

An article by Roland Racko, President of eWyzard Inc, published in Dr. Dobb's Journal, 2004

This is an extract of an article Ivar wrote for Cutter IT Journal, Jan 2002, and looks at how we can take Agile to the next level.

A series of examples and case studies on how people have used the Scrum Essentials cards to benefit their teams and improve how they work.

Combining agile and SEMAT yields more advantages than either one alone. This paper discusses how two current popular movements complement one another to provide a powerful basis for software development.

The way we develop software struggles to keep pace with changes in technology and business. Even with the rise of agile, people still flip-flop from one branded method to another, throwing away the good with the bad and behaving more like religious cultists than like scientists. This article explains why we need to break out of this repetitive dysfunctional behavior, and it introduces Essence, a new way of thinking that promises to free the practices from their method prisons and thus enable true learning organizations.

What do we mean by Quality? The word Quality is commonly used in software development, but it isn’t always clear what is meant by it. Teams create Definitions of Done, configure thresholds in their CI/CD pipeline, write performance tests and agree service level agreements, but are these sufficient for the level of Quality the customer expects?

Arguably, the most important aspect of any development endeavor is the Stakeholders - the people for whom we are creating the solution. Yet, how often do you see teams focus more on the product than its users, sometimes with dreadful consequences. Luckily, making sure your Stakeholders are being managed well needn't be hard. The Essence kernel includes a specific alpha for Stakeholders, with the states they can be in and checklists to help you.

Agility depends too heavily on tacit knowledge, but the Unified Process is too encyclopaedic. The answer? Virtual mentors that learn along with their physical peers.

Activity Spaces provide one powerful description of the Common Ground of Essence. Although useful just by name, there is a detailed description of each Activity Space in the Essence Standard. This article lists them in a slightly easier to find way.

In a recent LinkedIn article by Dr Ivar Jacobson, (replicated here to raise visibility), Ivar explores the various use cases of the Essence standard as they can be used powerfully by software development teams and organizations to develop better, faster, cheaper and Happier!