Software Engineering

The Activity Spaces are an often-overlooked aspect of Essence. These 15 descriptions of types of common activities that all software development teams will do are often overshadowed by the specific activities from Practices. But as this article shows they have value in their own right and can be a powerful tool to help teams improve.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Observatory is of immense global consequence, with a mission to build and operate cutting edge radio telescopes that will transform our understanding of the universe. They are doing this by building an unprecedented number of receivers across multiple continents. The SKA is designed to observe radio emissions such as those radiating from neutral Hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, spanning our planetary neighbours all the way out to the very early beginnings of our universe but is invisible at optical wavelengths. Studying its...

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!

This article is intended to people who are interested in successful adoption of methods / ways of working – an area of maybe as much as 50% failures. Guidelines on how teams and organizations are suggested to work have been proposed since we started to develop software. Such guidelines have usually been called methods or lately “ways of working”. Over the years we have had a large number of published methods.

Software Engineering was the theme of a 1968 conference in Garmisch, Germany, with at the time the leading computer scientists and methodologists in the world. That meeting is considered being the beginning of software engineering and by now we have developed the discipline over 50 years.

The first course in software engineering is the most critical. Education must start from an understanding of the heart of software development, from familiar ground that is common to all software development endeavors. This book is an in-depth introduction to software engineering that uses a systematic, universal kernel to teach the essential elements of all software engineering methods.

The way we have developed software over the years has followed a zig-zag path. Early on, we had no prescribed way of working, but we created code. In the 1970s, structured methods became popular, followed by object/component methods from the mid-1980s through 2000. These were technical practices. After that, we adopted Agile methods which focused on human practices or social engineering. Now we are in the Scaling Agile phase, which includes both human and technical practices.

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.

An in-depth introduction to software engineering that uses a systematic, universal kernel called Essence to teach essential elements of all software engineering methods