Publications

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.

The Agile Architecture Essentials practice provides guidance for achieving just-in-time architecture preparation and continuous and emergent evolution of the software system.

A modularized set of interchangeable practices that enable organizations to scale agile smoothly as part of a tailored transformation program that delivers value early and often, and builds a flexible and long-lasting library of practices, able to flex and grow over time in response to changing technology and business challenges.

Part of the IJI Agile Essentials Starter Pack of Practice Cards Agile Essentials practices provide a starter kit that describes key common aspects of team-based development. Each practice contains cards that provide succinct advice on how to successfully adopt and apply the practice.

The Agile Essentials practices provide a basic starter kit toolbox that covers all the common and critical aspects of team-based development. Each practice contains a small number of cards that provide useful, structured advice on how to successfully adopt and apply each practice.

We must work as a team! Teamwork is critical! There’s no ‘I’ in team! These mantras are plentiful and many Agilists believe that success at the team level is the foundation to success at the organizational level. But what does it really mean to work as team and is there a common recipe to build and grow a successful agile team? Agile believes in principles before practices and in multi-disciplined, self-organizing teams. All teams need direction and guidance, but with an agile approach no one should be telling the team how to do their job. Teams need to be empowered to make choices rather than be told exactly what to do. But sometimes things can start to unravel and too much time and energy can be wasted arguing about the basics. You can forget about scaling agile if your team is unable to clearly demonstrate the value of agile at the team level. But, get the basics right at the team level and engaged, highly motivated, cross-functional teams of teams can follow.

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.

The Agile Governance Essentials practice provides the guidance to align decision checkpoints between different development endeavors and non-software activities.

Part of the IJI Agile Essentials Starter Pack of Practice Cards Agile Essentials practices provide a starter kit that describes key common aspects of team-based development. Each practice contains cards that provide succinct advice on how to successfully adopt and apply the practice.