Essence

The way we develop software struggles to keep pace with changes in technology and business. Even with the rise of agile, people still flip-flop from one branded method to another, throwing away the good with the bad and behaving more like religious cultists than like scientists. This article explains why we need to break out of this repetitive dysfunctional behavior, and it introduces Essence, a new way of thinking that promises to free the practices from their method prisons and thus enable true learning organizations.

In the fifth blog post of this series, Brian Kerr and Ian Spence an experience report of a team learning and applying the Practice Mapping game. The power of this game is to see inside the mind of others and have useful discussions about the results.

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.

Ivar Jacobson International produced the cards in conjunction with Dr. Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum - applying the Essence standard to build a helpful reference guide to the essential elements of Scrum. The cards make it easier to communicate with team members, improve team collaboration and provide better overviews.

On June 1st, Dr. Ivar Jacobson delivered a keynote address at the annual International Conference on Software Engineering. Ivar shared his views on the history of software engineering to date and where we need to go from here.

On June 1st, Dr. Ivar Jacobson delivered a keynote address at the annual International Conference on Software Engineering. Ivar shared his views on the history of software engineering to date and where we need to go from here.

In this blog article, the authors share the first game that can be played using the Scrum Essential Cards. Use Practice Patience as a great way to perform a holistic retrospective on your Scrum adoption.

IJI has recently had the pleasure of working with Jeff Sutherland on a set of Essence cards that faithfully represent the Scrum Guide. As well as acting as a handy physical, and online glossary, the cards can be used to play games and help us all get better Scrum. In this new blog series, Brian Kerr and Ian Spence present a selection of the games you can play using the Scrum practice cards and, in some cases, other cards from Essence itself or from other complementary practices.

**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.

On 20 April, 2018, Dr. Ivar Jacobson will instruct a public lecture at Chalmers University. During his talk, he will revisit the history of methods, explain why we need to break out of our repetitive dysfunctional behavior, and introduce Essence: a new way of thinking that promises many things, one of them being to dramatically change the way we educate in software development to increase the competency in our profession.