Essence

Often when developing software teams lose sight of the big picture, and don’t truly understand where they are. This fast, structured retrospective enables a team to quickly understand where they are with regards to their software development. It does it in a holistic fashion that will complement any other progress measures in use, whether they are burn-ups, burn-downs or some form of earned value. It takes the blinkers off and forces the team to review all aspects of software development. Use this game to determine the state of your software development efforts. [Download the...

This instructional guide provides a brief introduction to the Alphas and presents seven different games that can be played with the Alpha State Cards by software development teams.

SEMAT (Software Engineering Methods and Theory) is an international initiative designed to identify a common ground, or universal standard, for software engineering. It is supported by some of the most distinguished contributors to the field. Creating a simple language to describe methods and practices, the SEMAT team expresses this common ground as a kernel–or framework–of elements essential to all software development. The Essence of Software Engineering introduces this kernel and shows how to apply it when developing software and communicating among teams and team members. It is a book for software professionals, not methodologists. Its usefulness to developers, who need to evaluate and choose the best practices for their particular projects, goes well beyond the description or application of any single methodology.

Agile rightly puts great store on the critical importance of transparency in all things at all times. To build trust and enable predictability, we need it to be transparently clear to all stakeholders what we are doing, how we are doing it, why we are doing it that way, and how well it is going - i.e. what progress are we making towards achieving the required outcomes. The Agile Essentials puts a toolkit of productive process tools literally into the hands of software development professionals, where it can deliver value every day in prompting and guiding the team and supporting team communication and collaboration.

Essence is a super-light foundation of software engineering including elements we always have, always produce and always do. Its application allows team to work in a super agile way and it turns software development to become more of an engineering discipline than just a craft. On top of Essence organizations are now developing practices and at the OMG Technical Meeting Special Event on June 18, 2015 in Berlin, Germany, speakers from companies such as MunichRe, Fujitsu, RedHat and Ivar Jacobson International shared their experiences in using Essence.

Essence is a super-light foundation of software engineering including elements we always have, always produce and always do. Its application allows team to work in a super agile way and it turns software development to become more of an engineering discipline than just a craft. On top of Essence organizations are now developing practices and at the OMG Technical Meeting Special Event on June 18, 2015 in Berlin, Germany, speakers from companies such as MunichRe, Fujitsu, RedHat and Ivar Jacobson International shared their experiences in using Essence.

Essence is a super-light foundation of software engineering including elements we always have, always produce and always do. Its application allows team to work in a super agile way and it turns software development to become more of an engineering discipline than just a craft. On top of Essence organizations are now developing practices and at the OMG Technical Meeting Special Event on June 18, 2015 in Berlin, Germany, speakers from companies such as MunichRe, Fujitsu, RedHat and Ivar Jacobson International shared their experiences in using Essence.

Alpha State Cards are a simple, easy way to track status of a software project and help plan next steps.

Dr. Ivar Jacobson delivered a keynote presentation at the TAI Internet+ Conference in Beijing, China on July 28, 2015. *This keynote address is in English with Dr. Jacobson pausing for Chinese translation.

New Alpha State Explorer app helps software teams focus on essentials, and keep projects on track, using simple check-lists based on emerging industry standard.