of scaled agile methods, where each method contains many of the same practices tangled up with a few new, unique, and innovative practices in such a way that the safe separation of the new practices for use with another method is nearly impossible.

In contrast, Figure 6 outlines a starter pack of agile practices based on Essence, called Agile Essentials. 2 It includes practices from Scrum, Kanban, and XP (extreme programming).

This is a small library of seven practices, which, when composed together, form a starting point for a team’s agile method. Scrum, user stories, and use cases have also been “essentialized” and can be used alongside the Agile Essential practices.

Thus, with Essence, a library of generic, reusable practices can be created, from which a team can select the ones they want to use and they can compose together to kick-start their own method.

The Ignite Internet of Things methodology. Ignite is a methodology developed for the Internet of Things. 8 It supports a number of different approaches and attempts to bridge the gaps between “machine guys” and “Internet guys,” and between “five-year thinking” and “continuous beta.” Ignite can easily be described as a set of practices on top of the Essence kernel. Figure 7 demonstrates what Ignite looks like when presented using Essence.

This picture readily illustrates a number of key points:

˲ Ignite clearly contains and reuses a number of generic practices that are applicable in many more domains than the Internet of Things, including those already available as part of the Agile Essentials practice library.

˲Successful development for the Internet of Things requires many domain-specific engineering practices.

˲ Whenever anyone wants to create a new method, they currently have to rewrite, re-present, and, in many cases, rebrand already established generic practices.

˲ The more comprehensive the ap-
proach, the less likely it is that anyone
will use all of it. For example, no one is
ever going to use all of these practices
at the same time. Clearly, there are
many methods that could be built from
the practices contained within the Ig-
will be able to plug and play with sets
of practices to build their own meth-
ods and take ownership of their way of
working. But where are the practices
going to come from?

Let’s take a look at two concrete examples.

Agile methods. The industry has
seen an explosion in the number of ge-
neric agile practices being published
and promoted. Unfortunately, most of
these “belong” to one method or an-
other and, even though they share the
same values, are rarely presented in a
way that lets them play well together.
This is particularly true in the area

Figure 6. Agile essentials with its seven practices.

Agile
Teaming
Essentials
Product
Backlog
Essentials
Product
Ownership
Essentials
Agile
Retrospective
Essentials
Daily
Stand-Up
Essentials
Agile
Development
Essentials
Agile
Timeboxing
Essentials

Figure 7. Ignite expressed as a set of Essence practices.

Vision Scrum
User
Story
IoT
Technical
Design
IoT
Functional
Design
M
et
ho
d
Io
T-s
p
eci
f
ic
P
ract
ic
es
Ge
n
e
ri
cP
ra
ctic
es
Ke
r
ne
l
Io T solution
delivery method
IoT
Project
Initiation
Use
Case
2.0

Periodic
Alignment
Shared
Backlog
Product
Manage-
ment
Archi-
tecture
Agile
Archi-
tecture
Manage-
ment
Product
Backlog
Product
Owner-
ship
Agile
Time-
boxing
Agile
Develop-
ment
Kernel