This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, maybe it is the end of the beginning” (Winston Churchill).

We are more than 20 million software developers on the planet, with a large number of methods to develop software. However, the most successful recipe for success is a method that focuses on hiring the most brilliant people in the world and empowering them to create wonders. 50 years ago, Ericsson in Sweden did that. Now Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. do that.

What about the rest of the world? – banks, insurance, airlines, defense, telecom, automotive, etc. How can we get these industries to be more innovative and develop better software, faster, cheaper and with happier customers? How can we do that given that the state of the art of our discipline is in such a chaos, characterized by the multitude of competing methods out there?

It starts with education, but it doesn’t end there. It goes on to dramatically change the way we work with methods, how we teach, learn, change, and in particular use them. I will introduce Essence: a new way of thinking that promises many things, never before known to software engineering, but already being adopted by for instance Scrum.

Ivar Jacobson was born in Ystad, Sweden, graduated from Chalmers as an electrical engineer, got his Ph.D. from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, was rewarded the Gustaf Dalén medal from Chalmers in 2003, and made an honorary doctor at San Martin de Porres University, Peru, in 2009.

Ivar has both an academic and an industrial career. He has authored 10 books in software, system and business development, most of them best-selling. He has written more than hundred papers, and in the last couple of years had seven papers published in CACM and ACM Queue. He is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences around the world.

After graduation from Chalmers he started to work at Ericsson. His major contribution there was the creation of a new way of developing software, component-based development, which was adopted in the development of the AXE system. This system was the greatest commercial success story ever in the history of Sweden, and it still is. Later he founded the company Objectory, which was acquired by Rational Software, now part of IBM. In 2004 he founded his current company Ivar Jacobson International, now an international leader in software development methods.

Ivar Jacobson is a father of components and component architecture, use cases, the Unified Modelling Language and the Rational Unified Process. However, all this is history. Lately he has been working on how to deal with methods and tools in a smart, superlight and agile way. He has developed a practice concept that is now being adopted by both developers and tool vendors. Now he is one of the leaders of a worldwide network SEMAT, which has the mission to revolutionize software development. And this is happening as we speak.