New Industry Standard for Software Development Approved by OMG

OMG has announced The Essence Kernel as a new industry standard for software engineering practices.

Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) is pleased to see that the OMG has approved The Essence Kernel (“Essence”) as a new industry standard. The standard comes after many years effort by IJI, the SEMAT community and OMG.

Traditional software processes are often too large and cumbersome for most development projects, and tailoring them down is often too complex a task. Agile has addressed this to some degree, focusing on the people aspects of development and minimizing process overhead. But in order to successfully scale up, and get the right balance of agility and governance, an ultra-lightweight, method-agnostic practice framework is required, one that can work with any project – the Essence Kernel is such a framework.

“We’re very excited that Essence has been adopted as an official OMG standard,” said Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman and CEO of OMG.

“By providing a common set of core concepts and language, Essence allows practitioners to flexibly construct and adapt software engineering methods. A very large thank you to our members in the Essence 1.0 Finalization Task Force, including Ivar Jacobson, for getting it through the OMG technology adoption process.”

Software practitioners need be empowered to build great systems. Management need visibility and control of what is being done. There is often a tension between these two needs – practitioners fear intrusion whilst management fear loss of control. Essence enables a practice-based approach, creating a separation of concerns between project activities and project governance.

With Essence teams can use any set of practices to meet their specific needs, while management can create and adopt any lifecycle that suits the governance needs of the project, programme or organization. Instead of throwing out old methods in their entirety and replacing them with new ones, Essence allows software enterprises to evolve their ways of working, by replacing old practices with new ones, resulting in the growth of a true learning organization.

Ivar Jacobson, Chairman of IJI and a driving force behind the SEMAT movement, commented:

“Until now, the world of software development has had no foundation – at least no common or standard one – on which to build. Essence is very small and light but can still help teams and organizations to significantly improve the way they develop software. Although Essence is not a new method it helps to make any existing method, process, or practices better – in effect, Essence can “power” any method”.

IJI has recently been authorized by SEMAT Inc. as the first organization globally to provide training and certification in Essence. A training schedule for Essence based classes is available on the IJI web site.

Learn more about SEMAT and Essence.[signoff predefined=”Enjoy this?” icon=”icon-users”][/signoff]