Session Title

A Better Scrum with Essence

Abstract

One of the most effective tools in recent years has been the use of Scrum Essential Cards to coach teams to improve their Scrum practice in their organization. These cards describe Scrum by using Essence. Essence is the international standard for defining methods and practices. Ivar Jacobson's company has worked with Dr. Jeff Sutherland, the Co-Creator of Scrum, to define a set of cards that provides a complete definition of Scrum consistent with the Scrum Guide. For instance, the cards have been used to have teams "Build Their Own Scrum" to clarify what parts of their implementation need work and define process improvements that need to be made in each sprint. Jeff Sutherland: “Work with these cards with hundreds of teams shows that the average Scrum team implements 1/3 of the 21 components of Scrum well, 1/3 of the components poorly, and 1/3 of pieces of Scrum not at all. Daily practice with only a third of components working well is like driving a car with wheels missing."

Exercises with these cards are dramatically revealing about how Scrum should work, how people on the same team may have different ideas about what Scrum is, and what a team needs to do next to improve their process. Jeff Sutherland: “One participant in this exercise using the Scrum cards said he learned more about Scrum in one hour with the Essence cards than he did in the previous six years of being on a Scrum team."

In particular, Scrum Essentials can result in a better retrospective, improved selection of process improvements for each sprint, a more clarifying Daily Scrum, and a more valuable shippable increment of product at every Sprint Review.

Learning Goals:

In this talk Dr. Ivar Jacobson will respond to the questions ‘why Essence’ and ‘what is Essence’ but focus on the question ‘How does Essence make Scrum better’. In particular, he will describe some new use cases of critical value to teams:

• Understand the Essentials of Scrum
• See where you are in your endeavor
• Plan your own achievements
• Adapt Scrum to your own needs
• Live Guidance™
• Dispersed teams

Although the focus of the talk is on getting a better Scrum, the talk will naturally extend to getting a better software engineering in general – an objective on the design of Essence by the organizations that created the Essence OMG standard.

A fresh introduction to modern software engineering and Scrum is guaranteed.

Bio

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 revolutionize software development based on a kernel of software engineering. The kernel has been realized as a formal OMG standard called Essence.

Ivar has authored eleven books and written hundreds of papers on subjects related to software engineering.