Contact

White papers

24 Questions - why Essence is not just another method white paper

Written by Dr. Ivar Jacobson, Paul E. McMahon and Roland Racko Over the years, collective experience of the authors has revealed many questions on the SEMAT and Essence initiative. To bring clarity of the initiative to our readers, the authors have answered 24 of the most common questions.

A New Software Engineering

The term paradigm shift may be a bit overused these days; nevertheless, the kernel-based Essence approach to software engineering can quite reasonably be considered to be such a shift. It truly represents a profound change of viewpoint for the software-engineering community. In this paper, Ivar Jacobon and Ed Seidewitz explore what happened to to the promise of rigorous, disciplined, professional practices for software development, like those observed in other engineering disciplines and explain how the Essence standard is the answer.

An image of the front cover of our White Paper entitled "Achieving Rapid and Sustainable Agile Transformation"

This paper discusses IJI's proven approach to sustainable change, and how under proper guidance from a well-formed Change Initiative, Practice Hubs, Coaching Hubs, and Communities of Practice can help make change "stick".

Agile Essentials - Learn how to improve your agility

Agile rightly puts great store on the critical importance of transparency in all things at all times. To build trust and enable predictability, we need it to be transparently clear to all stakeholders what we are doing, how we are doing it, why we are doing it that way, and how well it is going - i.e. what progress are we making towards achieving the required outcomes. The Agile Essentials puts a toolkit of productive process tools literally into the hands of software development professionals, where it can deliver value every day in prompting and guiding the team and supporting team communication and collaboration.

Agile Software Development Method Prisons - Tear down the prison article

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.

Agile Methods? Tear Down the Method Prisons! Set Free the Practices!

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.

Alpha State Card Games Guide - Agile Coaching Games

This instructional guide provides a brief introduction to the Alphas and presents seven different games that can be played with the Alpha State Cards by software development teams.

Alpha State Cards Guide  - Agile Coaching Tools

This Reference Guide provides a brief introduction to the Alphas and Alpha State Cards. It is designed to support the use the Alpha State Cards by software development teams and, in particular, the games that can be played with them.

Development Staff Playing Scrum Games

This article explores the synergy of Scrum and Essence, a domain model of software engineering processes, intending to become a common ground for software development methods, bringing clarity into the composition of methods from individual practices.

Creating Sustainable Agile Change Paper Image

In this fast-paced, responsive world, software development teams are adopting agile techniques to speed up development times and reduce risks, while simultaneously becoming more responsive to the needs of their customers. Many organisations have kick-started their agile journey and many have successfully introduced agile on a team basis; however, the real challenge is ensuring that agile can scale and is sustainable as corporate plans and personnel evolve over time. Helping organizations embed, sustain and scale agile ways of working is at the heart of Ivar Jacobson International's (IJI) expertise, skillset and intellectual property.

Contact Us