Google Switzerland Explored Essence
04 dic 2014
One of the first and most prominent outputs from the SEMAT community is Essence – a standard that defines the smallest set of concepts that are common to all software projects, aiming to help teams assess the health of their software endeavor and to improve their way of working. Ivar Jabcobson introduced this work at a tech talk at Google Switzerland in July 2014.
In order to explore Essence in a practical setting, a 2-day workshop was hosted at Google Switzerland on Oct 22 by Martin Landers, an engineering manager for YouTube. He and his team of five engineers took a look at Essence and its "serious games". Martin Landers felt that "Playing progress poker, reviewing health indicators and defining checkpoints triggered some good conversations in the team and helped crystallize some risks that I thought the team wasn't aware of or vice-versa."