In our recent edition, we feature Ivar Jacobson and discuss about Essence and his vision for future. He shared his views on how Essence came into existence, major development steps taken, value proposition in adopting Essence and a lot more.
Let’s read;
Q1. Tell us a little bit about the birth of Essence. How did it come into existence?
Ivar: The history of Essence is quite long, but I will be as brief as possible. It began already around 2000, when my baby RUP was at its peak of popularity. I was treated as a guru and my words had much more impact than I was comfortable with. People adopted RUP because it was very popular. However, I felt relying on gurus was a clear sign of immaturity of the software industry. At the same time XP started to become immensely popular and I could see that we had a new paradigm shift on the rise. Although I saw great value in the human aspects of agile, having paradigm shifts was another example of immaturity of the industry. And, of course, the method war, with people belonging to method communities (sects) fighting one another instead of collaborating, emphasised the foolishness in the situation. Even if I realised the software industry needed something to replace RUP for large-scale software systems, I didn’t want to go down that path again. Instead, I became more and more convinced we needed to do something more fundamental than creating yet another method. A first step towards what became Essence was when I realised that every method was just a composition of some ‘atomic’ mini-methods, called practices, such as use-cases, user stories, components, tests, continuous integration, organising teams. With a library of such practices it would be possible for the team to create their own way of working by selecting practices from the library and composing them into a method. I presented this idea at the XP conference in 2003. And this is when I would say that Essence was born.
Q2. Essence became an international standard through OMG in 2014. Tell us about the major development steps taken to get there?
Ivar: I founded my current company Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) in 2004 and a year or so later we had started our journey in creating what today is called Essence. Around me I had gathered a team of very practical, competent and creative people who all contributed to make Essence what it is today. Among these people were Ian Spence, Pan Wei Ng, Brian Kerr, Roly Stimson and Stefan Bylund.
Given our huge ambition the journey has been long but fruitful:
- In 2007 we demonstrated concretely how the important part of RUP could be redesigned as a composition of eight practices, which we called EssUP (Essential Unified Process). We gave EssUP a better user experience than traditional handbooks; every practice could effectively be described by using poker-sized cards. Several clients around the world adopted EssUP so we were inspired to take the next step.
- A year later we realized that we could apply the same idea for all methods in the world, not just for the Unified Process. However, we first had to identify a common ground which they could all share. We did that and the resulting common ground included a Kernel of essential things to work with, essential things to do and essential competencies to have, and a simple Language to describe the Kernel and practices/methods. We used the common ground with clients, such as Munich Re and Fujitsu UK, with very successful results among process engineers, but at that time with difficulties when deploying it amongst teams.
- In 2009 together with professor Bertrand Meyer (a world-class computer scientist) and Dr. Richard Soley (chairman of OMG, a standard setter) and I founded the SEMAT community, with support from about 40 other famous software industry figures (methodologists, software engineering experts, computer scientists, etc.) and equally many corporations and universities. Thousands of other individuals signed up for the idea of revolutionizing software engineering as a rigorous discipline, based on a kernel of widely accepted elements. More than 30 active members from SEMAT made a fabulous job of completing, clarifying and formalizing the work originating from my team of people and the resulting proposal, called Essence, was adopted by OMG as a new standard in 2014. A few people made seminal contributions to get Essence to what it is today: Ian Spence, Paul McMahon and Ed Seidewitz. Many others have had significant impact on Essence, but here I can just mention a few and I am afraid I miss someone. I have given a complete acknowledgement in the book ‘The Essentials of Modern Software engineering’.
Q3. The Essence standard is now six years old. What has happened since then?
Ivar: After we got Essence accepted as a standard, I quoted Winston Churchill “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” To make an analogy, Essence is to practices and methods what an operating system is to applications; without applications on top of the operating system there is no value to users, and ditto if no practices defined on top of Essence there is no (or little) value to teams.
- Having a standard Essence, with a simple language to describe practices, many companies including IJI were released to develop libraries of practices and methods. This happened around the world and to IJI it took us into 2017 until we could publish our practice library (https://practicelibrary.ivarjacobson.com).
- Several well-known methodologists have wholeheartedly embraced Essence and redesigned their practices and method frameworks using Essence. As an example, classical Scrum as represented by the Scrum Guide has become Scrum Essentials. Essence doesn’t change the intentions of Scrum; it just make it easier to learn, easier to adopt, easier to modify if needed, and maybe most important easier to use in daily work. What more could you ask for? Well, as you will see further down (point 5) there is more you could ask for.
- The adoption of Essence in the academic world is also growing fast. ‘Essence Education Forum’ chaired by Jöran Pieper with more than 30 university teachers committed to develop course material including games, examples (both small and large), quizzes, examinations, for teaching Essence and its use cases; I will also discuss the use cases further down.
- We have made great strides with practices, methods and libraries; method experts and process engineers clearly saw the values that Essence gave to methods and have willingly adopted Essence and its use cases. However, many teams (including product owners and scrum masters) had problems in adoption for the same reason that we always have had method adoption challenges by the people who eventually had to do the job. One thing is learning from books, papers, web sites, yes even from lengthy classroom training. Another thing is to use that knowledge when you actually need it. The acquired knowledge falls back and people easily go back to old, familiar ways of working. Thus, we understood that something fundamental was missing.
- That missing piece is what we call Live Guidance™. The different members of the team need to learn what they need when they need it, they need to get guidance when they do something, they need practices at their fingertips or in the palm of their hands. Scrum Essentials provides exactly that as described in a recently published paper ’Scrum Essentials Cards – Experiences of Scrum Teams Improving with Essence’ by Jeff Sutherland, Ivar Jacobson and Brian Kerr, in ACM Queue. https://essence.ivarjacobson.com/publications/articles/acm-queue-mayjune-2020-scrum-essentials-cards-experience-scrum-teams-improving
Reading this paper must convince every Scrum practitioner that Essence makes Scrum significantly better.Thus, our latest step in the journey has been to develop what we today call Essence in Practice™.
In summary, the journey has been very long since our ambitions were very extensive. We have been many participants on this journey – organisations and teams, academics and method experts. We have been very successful in getting process engineers to love what we have developed. But engaging practice users (practitioners and teams) has been a longer journey. I think every participant feels we are on the right path, maybe we need some small corrections, but eventually Essence and its use cases will give us better software, faster, cheaper and with happier customers and teams.
Q4. Tell us about the value proposition in adopting Essence.
Ivar: Essence offers many use cases for many personas. For the industry the most important ones are personas such as the team and the team member, the method expert or the champion, the sponsor or the executive, the program and the project manager, the coaches or the scrum master. For the academics the most important ones are the teachers and the researchers. In brief, a large group of people, both from the industry and from the academic world will see dramatic consequences when adopting Essence.
I and my company have worked with all these personas and more in mind, but we have focused on three key personas in the industry: the sponsor, the champion and the team. Any transformation requires support from these three personas to become successful. How Essence supports them would go too far in this interview, but you can find it on our web: https://whyessence.ivarjacobson.com.
Q5. What are some of the approaches you recommend organisations take in the current situation during COVID-19?
Ivar: IJI has extensive experience in virtual training and consulting. Please read about it in these blogs here;
https://www.ivarjacobson.com/publications/blog/dispersed-planning-part-1-preparation
https://www.ivarjacobson.com/publications/blog/dispersed-planning-part-2-facilitation written by one of my colleagues and SAFe Fellow Brian Tucker.
The testimonials we have got are telling in a clear language: it works very well, in some cases even better than traditional classroom training.
Going back to the Scrum Essentials method framework. Once Essence in Practice, which now is in user test mode, is launched, teams will be able to work distributed applying Scrum Essentials and soon many other practices too. Practices can be loaded into collaboration spaces called Team Rooms and used to actively guide and drive the team’s work, including their plan, do, check and adapt cycles.
Dr. Ivar Jacobson is the creator of Use Cases and the Unified Process, a widely adopted method. He is also one of the three original developers of the Unified Modelling Language. This work was around 20 years ago widely adopted in the software industry. But all this is history. Ivar founded his current company, Ivar Jacobson International, which since 2004 has been focused on using methods and tools in a smart, superlight and agile way. This work resulted in the creation of a worldwide network, SEMAT, which has the mission to revolutionise software development based on a kernel of software engineering. The kernel has been realised as a formal OMG standard called Essence.
Ivar has authored eleven books and written hundreds of papers on subjects related to software engineering.