The Agile Essence

The Agile Essence from SEMAT (Software Engineering Method and Theory) is a part of the SEMAT initiative, which aims to refound software engineering as a discipline². SEMAT is a community of people interested in software engineering, which have agreed that we have several significant problems in the way we practice software development².

The Agile Essence is fully supported in everything we do within SEMAT; we are agile when working with methods and practices². However, SEMAT is not dogmatic on which practices to use in a particular context². The reality is that the software community has a huge portion of legacy software that needs to be maintained as well as it builds new software using agile and lean methods². SEMAT is agnostic to which methods people want to use, but it helps teams to move from old ways of working to new ways².

At its heart, the solution is a kernel including a collection of elements present in any software solutioning context². For instance, we always have a software system, we always have requirements (whether we document them or not), we always have a team². The kernel would provide the common ground reference to among other things help practitioners (e.g., developers, testers, project leads, etc.) to compare methods and make better decisions about their practices².

Essence is method-agnostic and unites the myriad of disconnected, conflicting, costly, contradictory and transitory methods and practices that exist in most large organizations³.

Source: Conversation with Bing, 04/12/2023

Alphas

Alphas: The Essence Kernel defines seven core, common Alphas for software engineering, which together capture the key concepts involved in software engineering, allow the progress and health of any software endeavor to be tracked and assessed, and provide common ground for the definition of software engineering practices1.

Opportunity
Stakeholders
Requirements
Software System
Work
Team
Way of Working