Dr. Ivar Jacobson is a father of components and component architecture, use cases, aspect-oriented software development, modern business engineering, the Unified Modeling Language, and the Rational Unified Process. His latest contribution to the software industry is a formal practice concept that promotes practices as the ‘first-class citizens’ of software development and views process simply as a composition of practices. Dr. Jacobson is the Founder and Chairman of Ivar Jacobson International.
He is also one of the three founders of the SEMAT community, the mission of which is to refound software engineering. He is the principal author of seven influential and best-selling books and a large number of papers, he was awarded the Gustaf Dalén medal (“the little Nobel Prize”), and he is an honorary doctor at San Martin de Porres University, Peru. 

The first step of the SEMAT community has been reached: a common ground, a kernel, a foundation including universal elements for all software development endeavors has been created in the form of the OMG Essence standard. Essence is not a new method and it doesn’t compete with any existing method. It just make them easier to understand, easier to use and easier to improve. Moreover Essence makes it possible to compare methods and to create libraries of proven, reusable practices, which you can compose to create your own method. This is a dramatic change to the way we work with software development processes.
So what happens now? Companies around the world are now applying Essence to existing practices and methods to complement them with a superlight description by applying the Essence standard. This description is the essence of the particular practice or method - say we essentialize it. Now you can do a lot of things, for instance: put the practice in a practice library, easily compare it with other practices, compose it with other practices to create your own method, and activate it so you can measure progress and health of a software development process. Already today a number of small and large scale agile, iterative an incremental practices including user stories, use case 2.0 and methods such as the Unified Process have been “essentialized”. Many other successful practices and methods are going through the same procedure. Imagine if you easily could compare agile at scale methods such as SAFe, LESS, DAD, Nexus, XSCALE, and then that you on competent grounds could select the practices from these methods that best fit your objectives. You will be able to do that very soon. This is not just a dream, many companies around the world are now essentializing their own existing methods. Further down the road even more can be done, and Dr. Jacobson will paint an exciting future to you as a software developer.

Eun-Jeong Lee is Associate Director in 2e Consulting headquartered in Seoul, Korea. She is a member of the Practice Area in SEMAT Korea.. She has provided strategic consulting and PMO services to many banks and public agencies. Before joining 2e Consulting she worked for a bank and an accounting firm. She received a BS degree in English Literature and an MBA degree from

Real cases of applying Essence to IT consulting methodologies are presented. Different methodologies such as business analysis, IT investment planning and project planning were described using the common Essence kernel and language. The Essence-described methodologies relevant to a specific consulting engagement were selected and then assembled to define a coherent process to deliver the service.

Dr. June Sung Park received Ph.D. in Computer Science and Industrial Engineering from The Ohio State University. He taught and was tenured at The University of Iowa.  He was Chair of the Technical Section on Telecommunications in the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) in the U.S. 
From 2001 to 2009 he served as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Samsung SDS, a professional IT service provider in Korea. Since 2010 he is Invited Professor of Industrial Engineering, with joint appointment in Computer Science, in Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He is Principal Investigators of research programs in the areas of Mobile Cloud Services and Software Engineering Methods at KAIST.   He is Chairman and President of SEMAT, Inc. in the U.S., and Associate Editor for international journals such as Telecommunication Systems and Information Technology and Management

This talk shows how Scrum project management practice can be described using Essence kernel and language.  The proposed steps of mapping the Scrum practice to Essence kernel and language are generally applicable to other practices.
Practical benefits of using Essence as a common foundation for defining software engineering practices are demonstrated.  These practical benefits include the ability to compare practices, assess potential gaps, make needed practice improvements, and assemble select practices into a coherent method to benefit the project team.  In addition, by providing practical checklists, as opposed to conceptual discussions, the Essence-powered practice becomes something the team uses on a daily basis. This is a fundamental difference from traditional approaches, which tend to overemphasize method description as opposed to method use.
It is also shown that the Essence-to-practice mapping helps automating the health monitoring of project states and the adaptive planning of project activities.

DR. Michael Goedicke is Professor and Vice Dean in University of Duisburg-Essen with expertise in Software Engineering. He is co-chair of the Theory Area of SEMAT and sits in the Executive Committee of SEMAT. His research has been in the areas of Software Architecture, Software Architecture Description Languages, and technologies like J2EE, Web Services, etc.
Dr. Michael Striewe studied Computer Science and Archaeology at the Technical University of Dortmund and the University of Bochum. He received a diploma degree in Computer Science in 2007 from the Technical University of Dortmund. Since then he works at “Paluno - The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology" at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He received a Ph.D. degree in 2014 with a thesis on automated software artifact analysis in the context of e-assessment. He is involved in SEMAT since 2010 and is co-leader of the language track within the Essence standardization effort.

The Essence standard defines both a formal language to describe key elements of software engineering endeavors as well as a set of standard terms and concepts known as the Kernel. There are many ways to use these elements, including definition of software engineering practices, descriptions of the current state of an actual project, and creation and enactment of software engineering methods. In this publication we sketch and discuss some ways on how to facilitate these possibilities in order to verify the suitability and effectiveness of a software engineering method. The goal is to demonstrate how Essence Kernel and Language can be used in any project to get better insights into strength and weaknesses of the current project setup and methods selected.