Learn more about Essence

Essence is gaining popularity in software and engineering companies who find that "canned agile methodologies" do not quite hit the mark in solving their production or time-to-market issues. Interest in learning about Essence, the standard Common Ground of Methods and Frameworks adopted by Object Management Group (OMG), has been growing rapidly. In particular since the MeetUp ‘Essence for Agility’ (started Jan 2021) and ‘Essence Education Forum’ (2020) were created.

There is much to study from many different sources, experts and industries using an array of media (books, papers, blogs, the web, videos, etc.) and in Ivar Jacobson International’s (IJI) case training, consulting and tools.

In our Essence Education Forum, our community mission, is to facilitate education in Essence, creation of all kinds of training material as well as training itself. One important task for us will be to provide references to publications, training material on a universal level.

In this article I have limited my response to the material, we in IJI have created. Moreover, to avoid overwhelming you, I have limited the list to what I think is most interesting and up to date.

The “Elevator pitch"

The Essence common ground is a new way to analyse, evolve and experience the numerous software engineering practices and methods (often called "frameworks") within your own business context. It can help businesses to understand their gaps, develop their own learning tools and guide their teams to greater agile maturity.

These are not small or easy changes to make and businesses frequently approach us when a change failed to provide the desired improvement (or worse, it created unintended divisions). To really get "under the skin" of Essence will require some effort. Most important to the users of Essence is to understand its many key use cases. This cannot be done in the blink of an eye. However, to get a first taste of what it is about, why not read this short elevator pitch 'The Essence of Essence'

The “Crazy Things” Series

After almost 20 years of being a co-creator of use cases, UML, RUP, and more, I felt something was fundamentally wrong with how we worked with methods and frameworks. I felt having method wars, gurus and no common ground was unworthy of our discipline.

Over the years we have identified many "crazy things" when working with methods. I identified five "crazy things" and wrote an article for each one of them asking people to join in and discuss the "craziness". The wording in the title and the content expressed my frustration, for which I apologise. As Essence, among many other things, attempts to address these "crazy things", I recommend you to read this summary article "The Craziest Things with Methods and Frameworks" to get a feeling for "Why Essence".

There are also some videos and podcasts:

·??????InfoQ podcast with Shane Hastie interviewing Ivar Jacobson: The Craziness of Methods and Frameworks, and What to Do Instead https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/methods-frameworks/

·?????IIBA Brazilian Chapter Fabricio Laguna interviewing Ivar: What crazy things are happening with methods? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENXSFkpfzvw

·?????IIBA Brazilian Chapter Fabricio Laguna interviewing Ivar: Do you have a solution for the crazy things with methods? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKBw_yH0llM

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Value Proposition of Essence

Eliminating the "crazy things" that happen when you attempt to roll in a new "framework" is just one objective for of Essence, but there is much more that you can do with it. Why not start by asking yourself these questions:

• How could you measure the impact and value of your teams and people, being more competent in software development (rather than just measuring production of features)?
• Are your teams maturing their ways of working, or are they spending their efforts working to align to the latest prescribed pattern, which may not really fit for them?
• Are your teams intelligently selecting from a broad range of industry practices to evolve a methodology that is adapted to your products, environments and culture or are they stuck inside a "canned method"

Essence can facilitate businesses to define and grow their own Agile Charter of working practices and methodologies, which in turn has a profound impact on many different personas concerned with software development. Because every business is unique.

Here, is an attempt to give a feeling of the value of Essence: https://bit.ly/38Uq9Lg

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IJI’s landing page for Essence

We have recently designed some new web pages trying to respond to the question: “Why Essence?”. We have identified three personas, whom we assume have different missions to address: the team, the champion and the sponsor. Here they are:?https://whyessence.ivarjacobson.com/

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Better Scrum through Essence

According to Dr. Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum:

• “58% of Scrum implementations fail”
• “Essence can quickly identify the cause of failure”
• “Essence is the key to success”

Scrum done well is a highly effective practice, but what can you do when it feels like it is not working for you as planned?

At Ivar Jacobson International, we have been working hard on designing a training course which addresses the failures of Scrum implementations. Read what people say about the course: Better Scrum Through Essence Testimonials.

You can also read this blog written by one of the students: My experience as a student, https://bit.ly/3D05hix.

1. IIBA Brazilian Chapter Fabricio Laguna interviewing Ian Spence: How Essence can help teams to succeed with Scrum? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGwUtJ2H1gw
2. InfoQ, Ian Spence, Better Scrum through Essence https://www.infoq.com/articles/better-scrum-essence/

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Essence for Agility

Essence for Agility is a new community which we started at the beginning of 2021 and which has got significant interest among people interested in agile ways of working.

We organized meetups and many interesting discussions with participation by Jeff Sutherland, Kent Beck, Scott Ambler, Grady Booch, Murat Erder (Continuous Architecture), Joakim Sundén (Spotify Model), Bob Martin, Bertrand Meyer, Mike Cohn, myself and many others. ?You can find recordings of them here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/essence-agility-ivar-jacobson/. You can join the “Essence for Agility” MeetUp group to see our upcoming events: https://www.meetup.com/essence-for-agility/

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Videos?(in order of priority)

1. A Fireside Chat with Jeff Sutherland and Ivar Jacobson on Essence for Agility.?A meetup on Jan 6, 2021, with almost 600 people signing up (https://www.meetup.com/essence-for-agility/events/275263774/)?and having an interesting and entertaining time when Jeff and Ivar were responding to challenging questions. The evening was an enormous success. You can now see it here:?https://vimeo.com/499589189
2. Understanding Essence, a groundbreaking video which demonstrates how Essence can dramatically improve team performance. An absolute must see:?https://bit.ly/398vuiw.
3. Ula Ojiaku interviewing Ian Spence, Better Practices Through Essence & Agile Leadership, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT6QuoLyKF8
4. Tear Down the Method Prisons! Set Free the Practices!?This keynote from Nov 24, 2020, was given at NIKT, the national research conference on information- and computer-science i Norway.?https://mediasite.usn.no/Mediasite/Play/3ba96e2d519447a2be34eaf25d9123de1d
5. 50 years of software engineering, so now what??It presents Essence in a wider context than Scrum.?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1vydU3IWNk. A Sigsoft seminar.
6. A Better Scrum with Essence, with Jeff Sutherland.?https://essence.ivarjacobson.com/videos/better-scrum-essence-jeff-sutherland-and-ivar-jacobson. A Sigsoft seminar.?
7. Ula Ojiaku interviewing Ivar Jacobson, Essence and Doing Things Smarter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYFKaJoagTc

Papers?(in priority order) published in prestigious CACM and/or ACM Queue.

1. Scrum Essentials Cards – Experiences of Scrum Teams Improving with Essence.?https://essence.ivarjacobson.com/sites/default/files/field_iji_file/article/scrum_teams_improving_with_essence.pdf, a paper describing why you get a better Scrum with Essence. I give priority to this paper because it concretely demonstrates the value of Essence to one important practice. However, similar values are achieved for most other practices.
2. Tear down the method prisons! Set free the practices!?https://bit.ly/33DFLPs. This paper presents the key idea on how to be able to create an eco-system from which you can select the right method for each team.
3. A New Software Engineering,?https://www.ivarjacobson.com/sites/default/files/field_iji_file/article/a_new_software_engineering_final_version.pdf,?this paper explains why Essence helps you move to a more engineering approach.
4. The Essence of Software Engineering,?https://essence.ivarjacobson.com/sites/default/files/field_iji_file/article/essenceofsoftwareengineering.pdf,?an introductory paper
5. Industrial Scale Agile-from Craft to Engineering,?https://www.ivarjacobson.com/sites/default/files/field_iji_file/article/industrial_scale_agile_acm.pdf
6. Is there a single Method for the Internet of Things,?https://www.ivarjacobson.com/sites/default/files/field_iji_file/article/internet_of_things_cacm_published.pdf, important if you care about Internet of Things

Blogs and articles.?There are lots of blogs and articles, but some are of particular interest.

1. Better Scrum with Essence, by Dr. Jeff Sutherland.?https://www.scruminc.com/better-scrum-with-essence/.?Dr Sutherland says among many other things: “Essence the key to success”.
2. Curing the Achilles' Heel of Agile Method's Adoption.?This article addresses the infinity loop of method adoption and how Essence can cure the gap between the learning cycle and the delivery cycle. https://bit.ly/3s2lyxi
3. Methods are?only?Theory! Essence puts Methods into Practice.?This article is a more detailed explanation of the Achilles' Heel devastating problem. It also presents the cure offered by Essence in Practice TeamSpace?. https://bit.ly/3quci4S
4. Method Frameworks are like isolated islands. ?This article describes why we can’t continue with how we describe our most popular methods and frameworks. https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/method-frameworks-like-isolated-islands-ivar-jacobson/

Books.?There are several books published on Essence. The most important one is “The Essentials of Modern Software Engineering”, published in?2019.?https://amzn.to/398wL9i. Reading this book will give you the most coherent understanding of Essence and its use cases.???

Case Study.?As a global leader in container shipping, Hapag-Lloyd?now use?game-changing Essence technology?to improve the efficiency of their teams. Essence is helping them adopt and adapt agile practices to fit their real needs, providing tailored approaches for different types of projects.?https://bit.ly/397oxP1.

Tools.?IJI has developed several tools to help teams and organizations to adopt Essence. Essence in Practice WorkBench? is a tool to author practices and compose practices into methods. Essence in Practice TeamSpace?provides Live Guidance?to teams and organizations. If interested, please contact IJI.