Publications

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%

Read one of our student’s testimonial regarding our upcoming course, Better Scrum through Essence.

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.

Hapag-Lloyd are using Essence to provide proven agile practice options for teams to adopt and adapt, enable coaches to facilitate practice adoption and improvement, provide for tailored approaches for different types of project, and achieve transparency of status and health for effective governance.

Software Engineering was the theme of a 1968 conference in Garmisch, Germany, with at the time the leading computer scientists and methodologists in the world. That meeting is considered being the beginning of software engineering and by now we have developed the discipline over 50 years.

The first course in software engineering is the most critical. Education must start from an understanding of the heart of software development, from familiar ground that is common to all software development endeavors. This book is an in-depth introduction to software engineering that uses a systematic, universal kernel to teach the essential elements of all software engineering methods.

Many of the creators of Essence are also members of Agnostic Agile. Thus the need for Essence and its structure, elements and properties is based on the same values/needs shared with the founders and other members of Agnostic Agile.

In a recent blog by Fujitsu’s Rob Devlen, Fujitsu and IJI go Agile with Essence, Devlen describes how Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) worked with Fujitsu to create a workshop to build an understanding of Agile for their top 100 executives and senior managers in the EMEIA region. The blog article describes how we created that interactive workshop with them, facilitated the session and the results obtained. In this article we’ll show you a flavour of some of the content.

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.

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.