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Essence

Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) and Ken Pugh Inc. are delighted to announce a partnership to describe the practices of Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) and Behavior Driven Development (BDD) using the Essence of Software Engineering Kernel and Language. The newly Essentialized practices will be added to the ever-growing Essence based practice eco-system, giving organizations and teams even more flexibility as they select a way of working that is right-sized for them. The Essence and practice based approach is revolutionizing the way that the industry thinks about and presents...

Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) and Ambysoft Inc. are delighted to announce a partnership to describe key Ambysoft practices, including Agile Modeling and Agile Data using the Essence of Software Engineering Kernel and Language. The collaboration to “Essentialize” these assets will pave the way for their wider adoption and in particular facilitate their inter-operability with other industry standard practices in an ever growing Essentialized practice eco-system. Essence brings a paradigm shift to the world of software and the potential for its adopters to reap huge benefits in...

When Dr. Ivar Jacobson was awarded the Gustaf Dalén Medal by Chalmers University in 2003, at the age of 63, you could be forgiven for thinking it would be a fitting tribute to a distinguished career in software engineering; that the next steps would be lazy afternoons playing golf and watching the grandchildren get older. But that isn’t how Ivar saw things - rather than receiving this award and resting on his laurels, he kept looking around at what was happening in software, and what he saw troubled him.

Image of game board built using Team Space

Serious gaming to encourage and nurture an agile mindset, beyond just software and product delivery teams, using jargon-light agility cards.

Activity Spaces provide one powerful description of the Common Ground of Essence. Although useful just by name, there is a detailed description of each Activity Space in the Essence Standard. This article lists them in a slightly easier to find way.

Image of the Stakeholders Alpha, Recognized State

Arguably, the most important aspect of any development endeavor is the Stakeholders - the people for whom we are creating the solution. Yet, how often do you see teams focus more on the product than its users, sometimes with dreadful consequences. Luckily, making sure your Stakeholders are being managed well needn't be hard. The Essence kernel includes a specific alpha for Stakeholders, with the states they can be in and checklists to help you.

Essence Alphas Cards

Essence is one of the most exciting innovations in software engineering today - but what exactly is it? Unsurprisingly for something so powerful, with so many different use cases, Essence is often hard to explain. There are lots of articles describing the details, but in this article, we distil Essence down to a single page.

Picture of the Holy Grail

Our industry loves a fad - and in particular, we love to discover the Next Big Thing in development approaches. Each time we are promised a new (or improved) framework or playbook that will solve all our problems, and that we should immediately roll out to all our teams. And each time, we end up disappointed, without the results promised or anticipated, needing to look for a new Next Big Thing to repeat the cycle. It doesn't have to be that way, and the alternative needn't be as scary as it may seem. And it isn't another big framework!

In a LinkedIn article by Dr Ivar Jacobson, (replicated here to raise visibility), Ivar explores how the Essence standard can be used powerfully to make even existing methods better so that teams and organizations can more easily learn and consume them.

In a recent LinkedIn article by Dr Ivar Jacobson, (replicated here to raise visibility), Ivar explores the various use cases of the Essence standard as they can be used powerfully by software development teams and organizations to develop better, faster, cheaper and Happier!

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