The Industrial Internet will place additional demands on software development. It is the 3rd industrial revolution preceded by the Industry Revolution and the Internet Revolution. Software industry needs many development methods both older methods (waterfall) and agile methods, both for large scale and small scale projects. It is difficult or almost impossible to compare and reuse ideas from across the board of methods. Practices such as Scrum, Lean, Kanban, user stories. etc., provide pieces of what you need and can be quite difficult to compose into complete methods. The Essence standard is the common ground.
* Essence makes existing methods modular and interchangeable. * Fragmented practices can easily be composed into complete methods.
Dr. Jacobson Presents at IoT World Congress, October 2016
The IoT with its expected huge number of products will need a multitude of methods. Mandating a one-size-fits-all method was an old dream that never worked in practice. 60 years of having monolithic methods in system development is also enough. Let’s break their tyranny using smarter Essence-based methods.
The ESSENCE of the Industrial Internet
Since the technology behind the Internet of Things and the Industrial Internet isn’t particularly new — it’s essentially the convergence of low-cost computing power, omnipresent connectivity, Big Data and real-time, predictive analysis — the methodologies that have been used for decades still work. But there will be additional focus on distributed failure modes, replication, and prediction that should be reflected in updates to those methodologies. Most important is that every mayor player will need a multitude of methods such as traditional methods and agile methods, methods for simple apps or methods for complex system of systems, methods for distributed systems, systems with extreme real-time requirement, transaction-based systems, mobile systems, big data management, systems in cloud, and methods already used in business, telecom, defense, airlines, etc. This is where one of OMG’s most important standards, ESSENCE, comes in — the ability to “map” methodologies as collections of practices, and connect those practices across different development processes and groups becomes absolutely critical. Though the Industrial Internet isn’t about methodology, industrial strength industrial internet requires industrial strength methodologies, which points to the ESSENCE standard. Ivar Jacobson International which drove the standardization of ESSENCE, is using ESSENCE to provide a method starter pack for Industrial Internet, which seems very promising.
Richard Soley
Executive Director of the Industrial Internet Consortium and Chairman & CEO of Object Management Group