Articles

In today's ever more competitive world, boards of directors and executives demand that CIOs and their teams deliver "more with less." Studies show, without any real surprise, that there is no one-size-fits-all method to suit all software initiatives. The SEMAT movement has an answer.

This article is intended to people who are interested in successful adoption of methods / ways of working – an area of maybe as much as 50% failures. Guidelines on how teams and organizations are suggested to work have been proposed since we started to develop software. Such guidelines have usually been called methods or lately “ways of working”. Over the years we have had a large number of published methods.

Developing technical solutions is hard work. To make things easier, a number of agile practices and frameworks have become popular. They provide structure and guidance to help teams develop their solutions more successfully. However, doing these things well is also hard work. Despite in depth training, books, conferences and certificates, people still struggle to apply these practices well. Jeff Sutherland, co-founder of Scrum estimates that 58% of Scrum implementations fail. Playing simple Essence games can drastically improve your changes of avoiding being in that 58%

In this article Scott Ambler interviews Ivar Jacobson about his fascinating work with the SEMAT community.

A thinking framework in the form of an actionable kernel, by Ivar Jacobson, Pan-Wei Ng, Paul E. McMahon, Ian Spence and Svante Lidman.

Our industry loves a fad - and in particular, we love to discover the Next Big Thing in development approaches. Each time we are promised a new (or improved) framework or playbook that will solve all our problems, and that we should immediately roll out to all our teams. And each time, we end up disappointed, without the results promised or anticipated, needing to look for a new Next Big Thing to repeat the cycle. It doesn't have to be that way, and the alternative needn't be as scary as it may seem. And it isn't another big framework!

This article explains how to track progress of an Endeavor using the Essence standard and the key concept of Alphas.

The page explains how to play the Values Spotlight serious game using Essence WorkBench. It covers, the what, why and how of the activity.

The page explains how to undertake a User Story splitting workshop in Essence WorkBench. It covers, the what, why and how of the activity.

The page explains how to undertake a Target Goals exercise using Essence WorkBench. It covers, the what, why and how of the activity.