Essential Practices

If you try find a definitive description of ‘The Spotify Model’ you will most likely end up frustrated. There are some old videos and blog posts, and lots of internet articles claiming that it isn’t a ‘proper’ framework and that even Spotify doesn’t use it. Yet, it is reported as the fourth most popular scaled agile framework according to the 15th State of Agile Report and there are thousands of companies claiming to be using it.  So, what is it? And if you want to adopt it, where do you start?

Epics have a lifecycle, they don’t magically appear fully formed. There is work to be done to progressively elaborate a business case and if the Epic is approved then there is further work to progress the Epic through implementation. This post explores the Lifecycle of an Epic and the states it progresses through in that Lifecycle.

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.

In part three of this blog series, Brian and Ian review how a team played the Practice Patience game. They had been a Scrum team for over 6 months and were used to holding more traditional open ‘brainstorming’ style of retrospectives. The article reviews their experience with the cards guiding them to improve their application of Scrum, including some quotes from their Scrum Master.

In part three of this blog series, Brian Kerr and Ian Spence review how a team played the Practice Patience game. They had been a Scrum team for over 6 months and were used to holding more traditional open ‘brainstorming’ style of retrospectives. The article reviews their experience with the cards guiding them to improve their application of Scrum, including some quotes from their Scrum Master.

**London (26 April 2018)** - Ivar Jacobson International (IJI), a consulting, coaching and training company for enterprise-scale agile software development announced today it is expanding its partnership with Scrum Inc, the world’s premier Scrum training and consulting provider to bring the first certified Scrum@Scale classes to the United Kingdom. The first Scrum@Scale course will be taught by Jeff Sutherland.

To be agile as teams, we need to adjust our approach to meet our immediate challenges and needs. To be agile as an organization, we need to learn collectively and evolve our approach over time to support our evolving mission, so that we continue to excel in an ever-changing environment. We would not call a TV set “adaptive” if, in order to adjust the volume, we had to throw it away and replace it with a model with a different volume setting. So why are we prepared to accept process frameworks that leave us in a similar predicament every time we want to improve our product development performance as an organization?

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.

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.

A new, cutting-edge approach can help you harness the principles of disparate software methodologies to accelerate adoption and deliver value. Essence, a modular standard created by the Object Management Group and promulgated by SEMAT (Software Engineering Method and Theory), provides a method-agnostic, common language for re-using software practices. Companies using Essence have seen dramatic cost-savings, process improvements and even new business creation.  Essence enables configuration of the 17 best-known agile methodologies in the market into smaller, foundational atomic “bricks” of re-usable practices. Currently the CA Technologies stack (CA PPM, Agile Central, CDM, Release Automation and Service Virtualization) is one of the unique environments that support all of these re-usable bricks of Agile practices.