Articles

The Activity Spaces are an often-overlooked aspect of Essence. These 15 descriptions of types of common activities that all software development teams will do are often overshadowed by the specific activities from Practices. But as this article shows they have value in their own right and can be a powerful tool to help teams improve.

Serious games are games that do not have entertainment, enjoyment or fun as their primary purpose. There are many examples of serious games in the video game industry, but any game that has a serious purpose can be a serious game. For instance; card games, team games, sorting games or timed activities. The book and website Gamestorming describes dozens of ‘games’ that are played in person and address business problems in creative, engaging and most importantly, effective ways. Some examples you may recognize are SWOT Analysis, Brainwriting, World Café and Affinity Mapping.

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

Use Case Definition:  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, Scrum and Kanban.

Use Cases - The Ultimate Guide …this guide describes how to apply use cases in an agile and scalable fashion. It builds on the current state of the art to present an evolution of the use-case technique that we call Use-Case 2.0. The goal is to provide you with a foundation to help you get the most out of your use cases; one that is not only applicable for small co-located agile teams but also large distributed teams, outsourcing, and complex multi-system developments.

Essence is one of the most exciting innovations in software engineering today - but what exactly is it? Unsurprisingly for something so powerful, with so many different use cases, Essence is often hard to explain. There are lots of articles describing the details, but in this article, we distil Essence down to a single page.

If you try find a definitive description of ‘The Spotify Model’ you will most likely end up frustrated. There are some old videos and blog posts, and lots of internet articles claiming that it isn’t a ‘proper’ framework and that even Spotify doesn’t use it. Yet, it is reported as the fourth most popular scaled agile framework according to the 15th State of Agile Report and there are thousands of companies claiming to be using it.  So, what is it? And if you want to adopt it, where do you start?

In a recent LinkedIn article by Dr Ivar Jacobson, (replicated here to raise visibility), Ivar explores how the Essence standard can be used powerfully to make even existing methods better so that teams and organizations can more easily learn and consume them.

Welcome to the amalgamation of a short series of articles on crafting effective, well-formed objectives as part of the SAFe® Program Increment (PI) / Big Room Planning activity. We have seen a lot of confusion surrounding the use of PI objectives; confusion that often results in: Resistance to their use and; The production of poorly formed team objectives that appear to be completely redundant as they just list the Features being addressed. The first step to creating well-formed, useful objectives is for everyone to understand why they are so important. Covered in this document: Why do we need PI Objectives when we have Features? Writing good PI Objectives PI Objectives and the PI Planning Process PI Objectives Beyond PI Planning: Reaffirming and Monitoring Your Commitments