White papers

Every agile organisation aims to run successful programmes that demonstrate true value and IT results, presented in a way the business can understand. But many struggle with showing how IT and the business are better, faster, cheaper or that their customers, users and other stakeholders are happier since going agile? The single biggest problem we see organisations continuing to grapple with in their agile transformation programmes is not understanding why they are changing the way they work – not visualising the goal, setting targets, measuring improvements, or demonstrating the...

Industrial-scale agile means that agile at any-and-every scale is business-as-usual for an organization, across its entire portfolio, and that this capability is continuously sustained and strengthened. This paper examines two leading frameworks that provide guidance on how to achieve success within this kind of “complexity at scale” challenge space - David Snowden’s Cynefin framework and Max Boisot’s I-Space framework.

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.

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.

Use Case Definition:  Use Cases have been around for almost 30 years as a requirements approach and have been part of the inspiration for more recent techniques such as user stories. Now the inspiration has flown in the other direction. Use-Case 2.0 is the new generation of use-case driven development - light, agile and lean - inspired by user stories, Scrum and Kanban.

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.

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".

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.

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.

Use-Case 2.0 re-focuses on the essentials and offers a slimmed down, leaner way of working, for software teams seeking the benefits of iterative, incremental development at an enterprise level.