She who sees Horus and She who sees Seth

SEMAT Newsletter

01/07/2016

2016-2

Dear Reader,
Another fruitful six months have passed. Since Essence was adopted as OMG standard in 2014, we have
seen increasing use of Essence worldwide. We are pleased to share with you some of the recent
developments of Essence adoption all around the world since 2014. All this shows evidence that the
adoption of ESSENCE progresses in a fast however stable and well controlled manner and already
contributes to the success of software industry and education. We are sincerely looking forward to
continued acceleration of the wide-spread adoption of Essence.
Semat Inc. Management Group
I. Jacobson, J.S. Park, P. McMahon, M. Kajko-Mattsson, M. Goedicke, S. Malhotra
and P. Pal
Europe is getting more and more vibrant with Essence-based actitivies. It is
difficult to list them all. Some of them however are:
Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) has essentialized around 50 practices including
use case, architecture, user stories, scrum, unified process practices (7), Agile
Essentials (7), Agile at Scale Essentials (10) etc. DSDM Consortium
essentialized its Agile Project Framework. IJI has also released Practice
Workbench as a product supporting practice and method management. Many
other companies are also essentializing their practices.
In Fujitsu, ESSENCE is vital to for delivering great solutions. As Ste Nadin, a
recently joined member of SEMAT Executive Committee, ESSENCE ensures
that we have a common language for defining and integrating different groups
needing to work together to a common goal. A solution architect at Fujitsu, says
that Essence provides a framework for doing this which takes a few hours to set
up, rather than days or weeks.
In Munich Re, ESSENCE is a very helpful tool for providing guidance to the
projects, says Burkhard Golomb-Perkens who is also a new member of SEMAT
Executive Committee.
A book titled Software Engineering in the Systems Context has been published,
edited by Ivar Jacobson and Harold Bud Lawson, where several authors
contributed with chapters on Essence.
Many SEMAT members in Europe attended the Essence-in Practice Workshop
held in the OMG Technical Meeting in Berlin.
Ivar Jacobson and Ed Seidewitz published a paper titled A New Software
Engineering)based on Essence.
In the U.K., Red Hat uses Essence as a common language between Red Hat and
its customers, and also between different groups internally. Malcolm Herbert,
research director at Red Hat has joined SEMAT Executive Committee recently.
Copyright @ SEMAT

Edited by Mira Kajko-Mattsson

1(6)

She who sees Horus and She who sees Seth

In the U.S., Sumeet Malhotra at Tata Consultancy

Services has joined SEMAT Inc. Management Group. TCS
has engaged with all of its core industry partners like SAP,
Oracle, Microsoft and others and also the clients of TCS and is working with the core
methodology teams of those companies to help foster the collaborative adoption of
the Essence standard and turn this de-jure standard into a de facto standard. Paul
McMahon published a book titled 15 Fundamentals for Higher Performance in
Software Development where he advocated the use of Essence-based
checklists.

In South Korea, Korea Software Technology Association (KOSTA), the largest software training
institution in the country trains about 6,000 people per year, and uses the Essence framework in all the
entry-level software engineering courses. A software company called uEngine Solutions is developing
an Essence support tool as an open source project. An IT service company called 2e Consulting helped
a global insurance company essentializing its application development methods. Korean Chapter has
organized an Essence Conference in the IFIP World Computer Congress. June Sung Park together with
Paul McMahon in the U.S. and Barry Myburgh in South Africa have published a paper on the Essencebased Scrum practice (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2853088). Park has also published a paper on
Essence-based adaptive software engineering (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2820176).
In China, one of the largest telecommunication equipment vendors in the world has successively
achieved rapid and sustainable agile transformation based on the Essence standard. Japan Chapter is
working on essentializing project (anti-)patterns.

Copyright @ SEMAT

Edited by Mira Kajko-Mattsson

2(6)

She who sees Horus and She who sees Seth

Chapters Worldwide

Several chapters organized software engineering conferences where Essence-focused talks were given: (1)
Russian Chapter held the Software and Systems Engineering Conference; (2) South African Chapter
organized the Agile Africa Conference; (3) Latin American Chapter organized Latin American Software
Engineering Symposium (LASES); and (4) Indian Chapter organized Emerging Applications of Information
Technology (EAIT) Conference. Several regional chapter members are participating in the SEMAT
Education Project which is developing an Essence-based software engineering textbook and e-learning
materials.
Of interest is the scientific and practical seminar
arranged by SEMAT Russian Chapter on 26th of April.
The seminar was held for young people in National
Research University Higher School of Economics. It targeted
students, graduate students and young professionals with the aim of transferring ideas about
ESSENCE development, attracting young people to participate in scientific and practical work
and creating the SEMAT youth community. Mira Kajko-Mattsson supported the seminar with a
very interesting talk about her experience of teaching ESSENCE to KTH students in Sweden.
Prof.Boris Pozin and Aida Uvaysova presented SEMAT and goals of youth community. More
than 40 young attendees of the seminar were from six leading Moscow universities. The seminar
has resulted in a creation of a group of young people (www.vk.com) who are interested in
promoting SEMAT and in getting more knowledge in software engineering.

We have a new chapter established in Turkey. Another chapter

has been proposed in Malaysia. Turkish Chapter is planning to
participate in the annual SEMAT Workshop on the Theory of
Software Engineering (TOSE) this year, previously called the
General Theory of Software Engineering (GTSE).
Copyright @ SEMAT

Edited by Mira Kajko-Mattsson

3(6)

She who sees Horus and She who sees Seth

Case Study 1

New Case Study on Essence just published July, 2016

Measurable performance improvement demonstrated in just a

ew short months using Essence!
The new published article, titled, CMMI The Agile Way in Constrained and
Regulated Environments, appearing in Crosstalk, The Journal of Defense Software
Engineering, July/August, 2016 issue, employs a case study of an organization that
recognized they had gone too far in abandoning their CMMI-based heavy-weight
processes in favor of an agile approach. The article describes how the organization
rapidly put critical lite-weight practices in place -- complementing their agile
approach -- that measurably improved performance in just a few months by using a
combination of three frameworks; CMMI, Scrum and Essence.
Refer to: McMahon, Paul E, CMMI The Agile Way in Constrained and Regulated
Environments, Crosstalk, The Journal of Defense Software Engineering, July/August,
2016, http://www.crosstalkonline.org/issues/julaug-2016.html.
Paul McMahon

Copyright @ SEMAT

Edited by Mira Kajko-Mattsson

4(6)

She who sees Horus and She who sees Seth

Case Study 2

PRACTICE ARCHITECTURE ON TOP OF ESSENCE:

A Key Enabler to Manufacturers Agile Transformation
An IT division of a large global telecommunications equipment manufacturer with approximately
3000 staff and 700 contractors needed to keep up with business demands for shorter application
development lead times, higher quality and productivity. So they embarked on an agile
transformation initiative. Working with Ivar Jacobson International, the client established a common
ground and a practice architecture based on Essence to shape its adoption strategy and align coaches.
The client has received tremendous results to date and progress continues:
An agile way of working spread to 5,000 practitioners within two years by using an Essencebased Practice Architecture
A sustainable path to agility was created - teams could incrementally improve their way of
working and growing
Practices provided standardization which helped practitioners share and learn best practices
To find out more, you are welcom to read the full
article https://www.ivarjacobson.com/sites/default/files/field_iji_file/article/global_technology_man
ufacturer_essentialization.pdf

Copyright @ SEMAT

Edited by Mira Kajko-Mattsson

5(6)

She who sees Horus and She who sees Seth

Practice Area

The Practice Area Scenario Track completed a Competency Scenario that demonstrates one way a
team can use Essence to assess their own competencies and determine if their team has the right
competencies for their software endeavor. In the scenario the team studies Alphas and Competency
Cards to determine what tasks need to be done and what competencies are required for completing
the tasks. This new scenario will soon be available on the SEMAT web site (www.semat.org) as part
of the Essence User Guide.
With the completion of the competency scenario the practice area volunteers are now focusing on
exercises for the SEMAT Education Project book. Examples of potential exercises to stimulate
student learning include essentializing popular practices, applying Essence based card games,
identifying common activities that can help teams achieve specified Alpha states, identifying work
products and identifying new Alphas in support of practice development.
The Exercise track is just getting underway and so anyone who may have an interest in getting
involved in helping with one or more of the identified exercise candidates, or if you have your own
idea for an exercise, this would be great time to join the track. Working on exercises is also a great
way to learn about Essence and the value the Essence kernel can bring to any team regardless of the
practices they are currently using.
If you are interested in joining a practice area working group to either work on exercises for the new
book, or if you are interested in working on developing practices using the Essence language, please
contact Paul E. McMahon, or Ian Spence.
Paul McMahon

Copyright @ SEMAT

Edited by Mira Kajko-Mattsson

6(6)