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Daily Scrum practice is plagued with disfunction in over 50% of "agile" teams. This causes projects to be late, over budget, with unhappy customers. The key to agile coaching is to make the dysfunction clear without being directive so a team can decide for itself how to self-organize towards a shippable increment every sprint that delivers real value.

A free MeetUp looking at how Essence brings extra value to The Flow System and other frameworks

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.

5 Tenets of Fostering Sustainable Change blog Post

Change. This simple word has been used to create communities, build businesses, and promote adoption within a myriad of other actionable objectives. It is as common as the air we breathe and as revolutionary as any invention. Yet in all of its grandeur, it has incessantly stumped many businesses and individuals along the way. Software has taken a front seat in several organizations. It has become the core to any business, and change initiatives have sprouted and evolved to provide better solutions, be they faster, smarter or more affordable. Furthermore, for those organizations that adapt to change well and continue to sustain said changes and evolve over time, the rewards are exponential and in many cases, lasting. As new companies emerge in markets offering innovative solutions that can ultimately disrupt the market, those organization that cannot and or will not adapt and change, and perhaps more importantly, sustain change will lose. As a result, software development teams are adopting agile development techniques to shorten development times, decrease risk, all whilst developing solutions to become more responsive to the needs of the business.

50 years of Agile Software Engineering

On June 1st, Dr. Ivar Jacobson delivered a keynote address at the annual International Conference on Software Engineering. Ivar shared his views on the history of software engineering to date and where we need to go from here.

50 years of Agile Software Engineering

On June 1st, Dr. Ivar Jacobson delivered a keynote address at the annual International Conference on Software Engineering. Ivar shared his views on the history of software engineering to date and where we need to go from here.

Use Cases are the Hub of the Software Development Lifecycle

Since their inception some 30 years ago, use cases have been used to identify, organize, synthesize and clarify system requirements for organizations across the globe. In most recent years, they have been used in techniques such as user stories. Use-Case 2.0 is the new generation of use-case driven development – light, agile and lean – inspired by user stories, Scrum and Kanban. Although they are much more agile and lean, they still embody the same popular values from the past while expanding to architecture, design, test, user experience, and also instrumental in business modeling and software reuse. But, for the adoption of use cases to be seamless, there should be a balance of principles applied.

An article by Roland Racko, President of eWyzard Inc, published in Dr. Dobb's Journal, 2004

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.

This is an extract of an article Ivar wrote for Cutter IT Journal, Jan 2002, and looks at how we can take Agile to the next level.

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