She who sees Horus and She who sees Seth

Welcome Newsletter

2015-2

01/07/2015

In this issue:

the SEMAT Founder Ivar Jacobson and

the SEMAT Chairman June Sung Park
provide a semi annual report on the
SEMAT activities and progress.
Michael Goedicke reports on GTSE
2015.
Paul McMahon forwards feedback from
a tutorial on Essence at Binghamton
University.
Chapter reports from Korea, Japan and
Latin America.
Reports form Education and Practice
Areas.

Letter from the SEMAT Founder and Chairman

SEMAT is moving forward slowly , yet steadily . We are working and progressing on several frontiers. The fruits of
our labor are becoming clearly noticeable all over the world.
Education: An absolute must for the long-term success of SEMAT is that we get a great education program for
universities. Mira Kajko Mattsson at KTH in Sweden, Cecile Peraire at Carnegie Mellon in Silicon Valley, Carlos
Jaramillo at National University of Columbia and many other people have been working here and many more people have
expressed interest in participating. As more output come from the Practice Area, they will be able to make a more
complete program, and we are getting there.
Practice: The Essence User Guide is ready for publication thanks to Paul McMahon at PEM Systems in U.S.A. and Ian
Spence at Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) who led this effort as co-chairs of the Practice Area in SEMAT. The Practice
Area is now working on a Practice Development Guide, which is a good way to get other people to develop practices
themselves. All these publications will be accessible from the new SEMAT web site, which will be open soon. We need
say 50 practices described on top of Essence. Then people get something readily valuable. IJI has just announced an
Agile Essentials practice package including seven practices. The Agile Essentials extracts (essentializes) the useful
practice guidance from XP, Scrum, Kanban and other popular agile approaches, and presents it as a useful and usable set
of practice cards that development teams can freely select, combine and adapt to help them work effectively as a team. A
total of 29 practices are being developed at IJI and will be made public in the next 6 months. Other people such as June
Sung Park, Arne Berre at SINTEF in Norway are working on describing practices (such as Scrum, Agile Modeling,
Business Engineering and Project Management) using Essence.
Tool: Tools are needed for success in the industry. uEngine Solutions in Korea is in the process of developing an open
source tool to support Essence-based practice development and managementrelease date is not far away. IJI has for
many years developed a set of tools, which they are using in customer engagements.
continued on page 2

Copyright @ SEMAT

Edited by Mira Kajko-Mattsson

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Letter from the SEMAT Founder and Chairman, continued

Industry Adoption: We have a number of good case storiesfrom Fujitsu, Red Hat, Munich Re and Huawei. Many
more companies have started using or experimenting with Essence including Google, LG Electronics and Brazilian
Government. An Essence-in-Practice Conference was held in the OMG Technical Meeting in Berlin last month. The
video recordings of presentations in this seminar including success stories will be provided on the SEMAT web site soon.
Essentialization: Essence is spreading to other disciplines and methodologies. A discussion is going on to set up a new
area within SEMAT to develop Essence for Systems Engineering. A book titled Software in the Systems Context
coedited by Bud Lawson and Ivar Jacobson with almost 20 authors (including Barry Boehm, Ian Sommerville, Tom Gilb,
Don ONeill, Paul McMahon and June Sung Park) will be published within the next couple of months. Essence is a major
idea in many chapters of the book. This will certainly result in an increased interest in Essence among software and
system engineers. Discussions are also underway for reconstructing software engineering methods based on Essence
including a methodology for Internet of Things/Industrial Internet and an agile approach developed by a well-known
methodology consortium.
Theory: The work on a General Theory of Software Engineering (GTSE) is moving forward. The 4th annual GTSE
Workshop was held on the ICSE conference in Florence in May, where Barry Boehm, Pontus Johnson, June Sung Park
and others presented new theoretical results on software engineering including Essence-based adaptive software
engineering.
New Website: A new SEMAT website based on the Liferay Portal platform is just about to be launched. This work is led
by Michael Goedicke at University of Duisberg in Germany and Rick Jang at uEngine Solutions in Korea. Those of us
who have seen the latest of the new site are impressed and cannot wait until it goes live.
OMG Standard: Essence 1.1 has been accepted by the OMG Architecture Board thanks to Ed Seidewitz who chaired
Essence 1.1 Revision TF and many more around the world who submitted and commented on various issues. Once it is
adopted by the OMG Platform Technology Committee and the OMG Board of Directors, version 1.1 will become the
official standard. Version 1.1 is an incremental update, making a small number of clarifications and corrections to the
specification and adding a new kind of card for "Level of Detail". An Essence 1.2 Revision TF has now been chartered to
work on further improvements of the specification. June Sung Park at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and
Technology (KAIST) has been named as its chair.
All of us active in working within SEMAT are very positive about the progress and success of SEMAT. However, in
order to accelerate industry adoption of Essence, we definitely need more volunteers to define together practices and
methods using the Essence Kernel and Language, and do many more things to help refound software engineering.
Everyone who receives this newsletter is welcome to participate in SEMAT, and to participate, you may just drop either
of us an email telling your interests.
All of us actively working within SEMAT are very positive to the result achieved this far. We enjoy moving forward
towards fulfilling our mission and towards observing the profound impact of Essence in all frontiers of software
engineering domain such as education, practices, tools, standardization and so forth.

Ivar Jacobson, Founder and Chief Advisor of SEMAT

June Sung Park, Chairman and President of SEMAT, Inc.
Copyright @ SEMAT

Edited by Mira Kajko-Mattsson

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SEMAT Events
Report on Workshop on General Theories of Software Engineering
The 2015 GTSE workshop was held in conjunction with the
International Conference on Software Engineering in Florence,
Italy, on May 18th. The workshop was divided into four sessions
combining paper presentations and in-depth discussions. The cochairs provided an introduction and Professor Barry Boehm gave a
compelling keynote speech on Developing and Evolving a ValueBased Theory of Software Engineering.
Papers were solicited following the ICSE workshop timeline. We
received a total of 18 submissions, each of which received a
minimum of three reviews. To maximize time for fruitful
discussion, we limited acceptance to eight papers. Our process was
simple: seven papers had clearly positive reviews and were
accepted; of the three papers with borderline reviews we accepted
the one that we believed would most stimulate discussion.
The eight papers selected for presentation at the workshop convey a
wide range of perspectives and contributions. Johnson and Ekstedt
[1] and Park [2] both suggest theoretical foundations for a GTSE.
Staples [3] and Perry and Batory [4] meanwhile provide insightful
commentaries on the constructing GTSEs. In addition, Hall and
Rapanotti [5], Murtaza et al. [6], Barn and Barn [7] and Ghazarian
[8] propose specific theories, each of which may contribute to one
or more broad theoretical views of software engineering.

Program and other related information can be found

at http://semat.org/?page_id=1452. The accepted
papers were:
[1] P. Johnson and M. Ekstedt, Exploring theory of cognition for
general theory of software engineering - Predicting the effort of
program language comprehension, in Proceedings of the 4th
SEMAT Workshop on General Theory of Software Engineering,
Florence, Italy: IEEE, 2005.
[2] J. Park, Essence-based, goal-driven adaptive software
engineering, in Proceedings of the 4th SEMAT Workshop on
General Theory of Software Engineering, Florence, Italy, 2015.
[3] M. Staples, The unending quest for valid, useful software
engineering theories, in Proceedings of the 4th SEMAT Workshop
on General Theory of Software Engineering, Florence, Italy: IEEE,
2015.
[4] D. E. Perry and D. Batory, A theory about the structure of
GTSEs, in Proceedings of the 4th SEMAT Workshop on General
Theory of Software Engineering, Florence, Italy: IEEE, 2015.
[5] J. G. Hall and L. Rapanotti, Towards a design-theoretic
characterisation of software development process models, in
Proceedings of the 4th SEMAT Workshop on General Theory of
Software Engineering, Florence, Italy: IEEE, 2015.
[6] S. S. Murtaza, H.-L. Abdelwahab, N. Madhavii, and M. Gittens,
Towards an emerging theory for the diagnosis of faulty functions
in function-call traces, in Proceedings of the 4th SEMAT
Workshop on General Theory of Software Engineering, Florence,
Italy: IEEE, 2015.
[7] B. Barn and R. Barn, An approximate theory for value
sensitivity, in Proceedings of the 4th SEMAT Workshop on
General Theory of Software Engineering, Florence, Italy: IEEE,
2015.
[8] A. Ghazarian, A theory of software complexity, in
Proceedings of the 4th SEMAT Workshop on General Theory of
Software Engineering, Florence, Italy: IEEE, 2015.

Michael Goedicke
Michael Goedicke

Great Response at Binghamton University Essence Seminar

Thirty-nine participants from multiple industries including defense, medical, and financial attended Paul E
McMahons half-day seminar, Essence: A Thinking Framework to Power Software Development Team
Performance on June 4 at Binghamton University (http://www.binghamton.edu/watson/industry/professionaldevelopment/programs/essence.html).
The feedback from the attendees was overwhelmingly positive with many expressing interest in follow-on sessions.
Our next step is to conduct a survey to determine where greatest interest lies for follow on sessions. Possible
options include conducting the same seminar again, and a session focused on how Essence can help organizations
in highly regulated environments (i.e. defense, medical, financial) with an interest in transitioning to a more agile
and lean way of working without risking meeting their compliance requirements.
Figure 3. The tutorial participants including the presenters

Copyright @ SEMAT

Paul McMahon
Edited by Mira Kajko-Mattsson

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Chapter Reports
Korea Chapter
The Korea Chapter of SEMAT had the Second Annual
Membership Meeting and a symposium on Essence in Seoul on
November 13, 2014 where 62 people from 40 companies
attended and 5 presentations were given about the experience
of using Essence in respective companies. Five people from
the Korea Chapter attended the Essence-in-Practice Conference
in Berlin on June 18th. Rick Jang, CEO of uEngine Solutions
and Chair of the Tools Area in the Korea Chapter, presented in
the conference about "Essencia", an Essence-support tool being
developed as an open source software, which can assist
practitioners to define software engineering practices using
Essence kernel and language, assemble practices into a projectspecific method, orchestrate the workflow of project activities
based on the defined method, and monitor the progress of alpha
states using a a dashboard.

June Sung Park

Latin American Chapter

Latin America has been active with Essence as a new OMG
standard. Previous editions of the Latinamerican Software
Engineering Symposium have been linked to the Essence.
LASES 2015 will be again the meeting of the Latinamerican
SEMAT enthusiasts. Bogot will join Medelln, Lima, and
Barranquilla in hosting the new ideas about SEMAT in Latin
America. Next November SEMAT and Agile will be the focus
of Latin American researchers and practitioners. This time the
Keynote Speakers will be Paul McMahon, Scott Ambler, and
Philippe Kruchten. In Addition, Ken Schwaber---father of
Scrum---will give a talk by videoconference. LASES 2015 will
be an opportunity to see how close are Agile and SEMAT.
Latin America is also active in promoting several Ph.D. and
M.Sc. thesis about SEMAT. Some of such theses are starting to
be defended, since several others are progressing in a good
way. Issues like kernel consistency, method representation,
practices, and complementary theories to the Essence are
covered. We are also working on the usage of SEMAT for
representing empirical software engineering laws and metrics.
From the practitioner point of view, we are promoting alliances
among universities and companies for studying the Essence
kernel and promoting new ways to spread the SEMAT
message to practitioners and clients. We are making this
possible in some countries of our region. As a result, we expect
to see soon some real projects involving universities, software
companies, and clients, as the SEMAT initiative is suggesting
for reinforcing our community.
SEMAT is growing stronger in Latin America. Very important
????
things are coming for the SEMAT initiativeChenfrom
Zhong Latin
America.

Japan Chapter
In Japan Chapter (Chair: Prof. Hironori Washizaki, Waseda
University), some members are continuing on translations of
SEMAT articles and books including "The Essence of Software
Engineering" into Japanese. Moreover, Japan Chapter is
planning to have new study group meetings in the near future.

Carlos Mario Zapata Jaramillo

Hironori Washizaki

Copyright @ SEMAT

Edited by Mira Kajko-Mattsson

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Area Reports
Education Area
Right now, the Education Area is in the process of developing
a scenario describing how the Requirement Item sub-alpha
boosts progress of the Requirements alpha. The Educcation
Area is ready with two scenarios describing the use of the
Essence alphas and two handouts for practicing them. Both the
scenarios and handouts were practiced on a bachelor software
engineering course at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Here, we dare say that the KTH students of 2015 were the first
students in the world to be exposed to the SEMAT scenarios.
The first scenario concerns kick-starting a project dealing with
scaling up and modernizing a legacy system [1]. Here, the
Kernel Alphas are used for establishing the project status. The
second scenario concerns monitoring the progress and health
of a project dealing with the development of an online
university course management system [2]. Here, the Alphas are
used for identifying and solving various pain points.
The second scenario is supplemented with two handouts
providing exercises on the Essence Kernel [3, 4]. Each handout
deals with one Alpha only (Requirements and Team). The goal
is to help a novice student to focus on one Alpha, and thereby,
help him/her better understand its practical usage.
The introduction of the SEMAT ESSENCE was conducted in
two stages. In the first stage, the students would read the first
scenario, identify understanding problems and document them.
The goal was twofold: (1) to help students understand what the
project status evaluation looked like, and (2) to find out
whether they had any understanding difficulties. To our great
surprise, very few students had any understanding problems.

In the second stage, the students would do the same; this time,
however, they would study the second scenario and they would
exercise the two handouts. For each handout, they would
define the state of its respective Alpha on the basis of the
descriptions provided in the handout. Even here, we got nicely
surprised. Most of the students could easily identify the status
of each handout alpha studied.

In the year of 2015, the students were prepared not only to

monitor the progress and health of their projects but also for
planning projects, for identifying project problems and risks
and for defining solutions and various action items. Two
photographs of students working with the alphas are presented
in Figure 1. Depending on the purpose, they either hang the
alpha cards on the wall or organized them on the table.

Cecile Peraire and Mira Kajko-Mattsson

[1] Kajko-Mattsson, M., Palank, B., Myburgh, B., McMahon,
P.E., Peraire, C., Menezez, W., A Scenario on Kick-Starting a
Project, www.semat.org, retrieved on May 5, 2015.
[2] Peraire, C., Kajko-Mattsson, M., Myburgh, B., McMahon,
P.E., Menezez, W., Palank, B., A Scenario on Solvning Pain
Points, www.semat.org, retrieved on May 5, 2015.
[3] Peraire, C., Kajko-Mattsson, M., Myburgh, B., Vierira
Nelson M.A., McMahon, P.E., Solving Pain Points with Team
Alpha, www.semat.org, retrieved on May 5, 2015.
[4] Vierira Nelson M.A., Kajko-Mattsson, M., Myburgh, B.,
Peraire, C., McMahon, P.E., Solvning Pain Points with Team
Alpha, www.semat.org, retrieved on May 5, 2015.

Practice Area

Figure 1. KTH students of the 2015 year

working with the alpha cards
Copyright @ SEMAT

In the practice area volunteer groups are continuing to

work on multiple competency scenarios that will be used to
help practitioners and students learn how to use the
Essence competencies to assess team skills. Work is also
continuing on the practice development guide and multiple
practice examples are in the process of being developed by
volunteers.
Paul McMahon

Edited by Mira Kajko-Mattsson

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