Essence

An in-depth introduction to software engineering that uses a systematic, universal kernel called Essence to teach essential elements of all software engineering methods

This instructional guide provides a brief introduction to the Alphas and presents seven different games that can be played with the Alpha State Cards by software development teams.

In the 6th blog of our series, Brian and Ian present the Contract Bridge game played with the Scrum Essential cards. The game is useful wherever there is a perceived boundary between a Scrum Team and its customers.

In the fifth blog post of this series, Brian Kerr and Ian Spence an experience report of a team learning and applying the Practice Mapping game. The power of this game is to see inside the mind of others and have useful discussions about the results.

In the fourth blog post of this series, Brian Kerr and Ian Spence provide directions to use the Scrum Essential Cards to play the Practice Mapping game. You can use this game to test the understanding of individuals or small groups, particularly as part of a training event.

In part three of this blog series, Brian and Ian review how a team played the Practice Patience game. They had been a Scrum team for over 6 months and were used to holding more traditional open ‘brainstorming’ style of retrospectives. The article reviews their experience with the cards guiding them to improve their application of Scrum, including some quotes from their Scrum Master.

In this blog article, the authors share the first game that can be played using the Scrum Essential Cards. Use Practice Patience as a great way to perform a holistic retrospective on your Scrum adoption.

IJI has recently had the pleasure of working with Jeff Sutherland on a set of Essence cards that faithfully represent the Scrum Guide. As well as acting as a handy physical, and online glossary, the cards can be used to play games and help us all get better Scrum.

In this new blog series, Brian Kerr and Ian Spence present a selection of the games you can play using the Scrum practice cards and, in some cases, other cards from Essence itself or from other complementary practices.

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

This article explains why we need to break out of this repetitive dysfunctional behavior, and it introduces Essence, a new way of thinking that promises to free the practices from their method prisons and thus enable true learning organizations.