Essence

As with any new initiative people are struggling to see how it fits into the world and how it relates to all the other things going on. For example does it improve or replace their current ways of working. Is it something like lean that supports and furthers the aims of the Agile Movement, or is it something like waterfall planning that is in opposition to an agile approach? The good news is that both Agile and SEMAT promote non-prescriptive value-based philosophies that encourage software development teams to select and use whatever practices best fit their context and, most importantly, continuously inspect, adapt and improve their way of working. In this keynote we will look at how these two initiatives complement one another, providing the perfect foundation for teams that want to master the art of software development.

Learn how to use simple cards and checklists to achieve lean governance for agile software development projects and programs. First presented as a webinar by Ian Spence on 23rd April 2014.

In the same way that Google map shows you where you are, where you want to go, and the best way to get there when making a journey, SEMAT and Essence can do the same for teams of engineers developing software.

It's been said that the only real sustainable competitive advantage is an organization's ability to learn faster than the competition. Learn how in this webinar presented on June 18th by Brian Kerr of Ivar Jacobson International.

In today's ever more competitive world, boards of directors and executives demand that CIOs and their teams deliver "more with less." Studies show, without any real surprise, that there is no one-size-fits-all method to suit all software initiatives. The SEMAT movement has an answer.

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.

Ivar Jacobson International provided a three-day workshop on the Essence standard to the development team at a large multinational corporation specializing in Internet services. Learn about our Essence training and what the team thought.

This equipment vendor needed to move from a traditional waterfall approach to an agile way of working. They decided to engage with Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) to assist them with their agile transformation. IJI was chosen because of its expertise in large-scale agile transformation and its thought leadership. SEMAT's Essence and IJI's sustainable change model were central to the equipment provider's agile transformation strategy and success.

The Object Management Group® (OMG®), an international, open membership, not-for-profit technology standards consortium, released a new case study detailing Munich RE's successful application of the Essence standard with guidance provided from Ivar Jacobson International (IJI).

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.