RUP Notes

The Rational Unified Process (RUP) is a proprietorial process that has been developed by the Rational Software Corporation, now part of IBM.

RUP provides the software developer with a DISCIPLINED approach to the development process.

The aim of RUP is to ensure a high-quality result that satisfies user requirements within a predictable budget and schedule. It was designed to be fully compatible with object-oriented technology and the UML. It supports component-based software development.

RUP is a configurable process. It uses use cases to drive the development activities. Use cases facilitate the development from the beginning of the development process through to testing. And they give you a means to trace the process flow through the development of the system and the delivered product.

RUP is the opposite of sequential approaches. It is an iterative and incremental approach to the software life cycle. RUP encourages continuous integration. (Note, here it is "encourage", which means you still need to implemente your own continuous integration, or also called continuous build. Since RUP as a process to focus the final executible deliverables, continuous build servics as compliment to build the deliverables automatically. Sometime the build can also include regression tests which is even better.)

RUP deals errors and flaws in the system over successive iterations, thus makes the system more robust and stable.

Coming behind RUP are requirements management and change control. RM ensures the system better meets the customer's expectations, also limits the size of the project to acceptable levels(scope). Change control helps keep track of defects, misunderstandings, and project commitments and to associate them with specific artifacts.

RUP is architecture-centric, its early iterations has a main thrust to produce and validate a software architecture.

In RUP, quality control has been incorporated into the process. This quality assessment uses objective measurements and criteria for all activities and participants in the process.

RUP has four phases and each phase has iterations. At the end of each phase, comes a milestone, which is a predefined point in time by which certain goals must be achieved and certain decisions made. During the inception phase, the original vision of the product is transformed into a project(my understanding, a well defined plan, definition of deliveriables, iterations, etc.). Formulate the vision, establish business cases and specify the project scope, make decisions on what to invest time and money on. Business cases include success criteria, risk assessment, estimation of resources, phase plan indicating the dates of milestones, prototyping.

The goal of the elaboration phase is more thorough analysis of the problem domain, to establish and define the architecture, to address and eliminate high-rish elements of the project, to determine how the work should be divided into iterations(I think it is difficult but critical. It needs strategic thinking, knowledge and experience. But it is also where the value of a good architect lies.) At the end of the elaboration phase, the decision must be made to build or not the system.

The third phase is the construction. In its final iteration the construction delivers a constructed software system.

RUP defines a transition phase, where the product is supplied to its end-users. Plan the packaging, pricing, roll out, support, training, transition strategy, production details.

It's recommended to have a "postmortem" analysis of the project, addressing how well the original and revised success criteria have been met.

There are nine core workflows in the RUP, either engineering process workflows or supporting process workflows. Business modeling, requirements capture, application/system analysis and design, implementation, testing, deployment