Publications

Essence is a super-light foundation of software engineering including elements we always have, always produce and always do. Its application allows team to work in a super agile way and it turns software development to become more of an engineering discipline than just a craft. On top of Essence organizations are now developing practices and at the OMG Technical Meeting Special Event on June 18, 2015 in Berlin, Germany, speakers from companies such as MunichRe, Fujitsu, RedHat and Ivar Jacobson International shared their experiences in using Essence.

Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, invited Dr Ivar Jacobson to his podcast to speak about his work defining the essence of software engineering.

The way we develop software struggles to keep pace with changes in technology and business. Even with the rise of agile we still see people flip-flopping from one branded method (or to be more fashionable framework) to another throwing away the good with the bad, and behaving more like religious cultists than scientists. Dr. Ivar Jacobson delivered this presentation at a keynote address at SECR Russia in October 2017. He revisited the history of methods, explained why we need to break out of our repetitive dysfunctional behavior, and introduced Essence: a new way of thinking that promises to liberate the practices and enable true learning organizations.

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.

The Object Management Group® (OMG®), an international, open membership, not-for-profit technology standards consortium, released a new case study detailing Munich RE's successful application of the Essence standard with guidance provided from Ivar Jacobson International (IJI).

How can software developers, programmers and managers meet the challenges of the 90s and begin to resolve the software crisis? This book is based on Objectory which is the first commercially available comprehensive object-oriented process for developing large-scale industrial systems. Ivar Jacobson developed Objectory as a result of 20 years of experience building real software-based products. The approach takes a global view of system development and focuses on minimizing the system's life cycle cost. Objectory is an extensible industrial process that provides a method for building large industrial systems. This revised printing has been completely updated to make it as accessible and complete as possible. New material includes the revised Testing chapter, in which new product developments are discussed. This book shows how software development can be carried out in a more "industrialized" manner using ObjectOry, a complete environment evolved by the author for the development of large software systems with an object-oriented approach. It relies on three independently developed techniques: conceptual modelling, object-oriented programming, and a block-oriented design technique developed within telecommunications. Suitable for self-study or classroom use, the book is divided into three sections: an introduction to system development and the requirements of an industrial process; the use of object-orientation in the different phases of system development, using ObjectOry; and applications with ObjectOry. Thus, the book presents a coherent picture of how to use object-orientation in system development in a way which makes it accessible to both practitioners in the field and students with no previous knowledge of system development.

The way we have developed software over the years has followed a zig-zag path. Early on, we had no prescribed way of working, but we created code. In the 1970s, structured methods became popular, followed by object/component methods from the mid-1980s through 2000. These were technical practices. After that, we adopted Agile methods which focused on human practices or social engineering. Now we are in the Scaling Agile phase, which includes both human and technical practices.