Keynote & invited speakers

Ivar Jacobson

Founder and Chairman, Ivar Jacobson International

Dr. Ivar Jacobson is a father of software engineering with contributions such as component architecture, use cases, Unified Modelling Language and Rational Unified Process. Since 2005 he has been working on how to deal with methods and tools in a smart, superlight and agile way, resulting in the Essence standard kernel and language. He is the principal author of seven influential and best-selling books.

Read the Interview with Ivar Jacobson »

Kill All Methods – Free the Practices

October 21, 17:25
Room I

The way we develop software struggles to keep pace with changes in technology and business. Even with the rise of agile we still see people flip-flopping from one branded method (or to be more fashionable framework) to another throwing away the good with the bad, and behaving more like religious cultists than scientists.

Can we truly enable and empower our teams and become true learning organizations whilst we behave more like the fashion industry than an engineering profession? Can we really see our ourselves as an open, diverse and collaborative community whilst we continually attack one another and rebrand, reinvent and rename everything like old hipsters trying to stay in with the in-crowd. Are we doomed to be locked in a never ending method war in the hope that the one true way emerges to rule them all?

The answer is no. There is a simple way to break out of this cycle of unhealthy competition between methods that are more similar than they are different, and that is to free the practices. Free the practices to rise and fall based on their own merits. Free the practices so that teams can experiment, innovate and plug and play with proven practices to create the way-of-working that they need today and seamlessly evolve into the one they need tomorrow.

In this presentation Dr Ivar Jacobson will revisit the history of methods, explain why we need to break out of our repetitive dysfunctional behavior, and introduce Essence: a new way of thinking that promises to liberate the practices and enable true learning organizations.

Master-class: Achieving Lean Governance with a Lightweight Universal Thinking Framework

October 22, 2017, 10:00–14:30

In English
Workshop is not a part of the main conference program and requires separate registration

Learn to Manage Software Development Risk, Status and Health in a Lean and Agile Way

Speed is of the essence. We must deliver much more value to our customers much faster, or risk losing out to those more agile than us.

However, a key challenge in our pursuit of speed is increased risk of failure.

Project management best practice such as PMBOK rightly emphasise the need to manage risks, but provide few concrete steers on what kind of risks we face in our software development endeavours, nor how to detect and mitigate these risks in practice.

Methodologies such as the Rational Unified Process (RUP) give much more concrete guidance on how to mitigate software development risk, but as a result became increasingly heavyweight and prescriptive, increasing overheads and delays, and decreasing teams’ empowerment to respond rapidly to day-to-day challenges.

Ivar Jacobson was a founding father of RUP, but came to recognise that what is needed is not a prescriptive “solution to all problems”, but a clear shared understanding of the software development problem space. If we understand the journey that we all travel when we do software development, we will understand the risks that we face and how to manage them.

Workshop attendees will learn how to use the standard Essence kernel to maximize speed and minimize risk. They will work together in teams to apply the OMG Essence standard to deploy clear and objective indicators of the status and health of an endeavour, including how to:

• Measure status and health independent of chosen methodology
• Define method-neutral quality gates for effective lifecycle governance.

Each attendee will receive the tools they need to apply these techniques to their own projects, including Essence Alpha State Cards, Games Instructions and Guide Book.