Chapter 11. Adopting the Rational Unified Process

In this chapter, we will discuss the motivation for introducing the RUP, how to implement the RUP for a project, and different approaches and strategies for implementing the RUP across a series of projects within an organization.

The reason for introducing the RUP and supporting tools into your organization is to obtain business benefits measured in improved project results. To be worth the investment, process improvement through effective use of the RUP and associated technologies must ultimately lead to higher quality systems, lower cost, or shorter time to market. Time spent on process improvement easily becomes overhead unless these objectives are clear in everyone's mind. A common mistake is to roll out too "heavyweight" a version of the RUP, where you have too many artifacts that need to be produced by the project team. This may prevent you from reaching expected business results. Whenever possible, you should minimize the number of artifacts to be produced, without compromising on quality.

Adopting the RUP means that you need to change the way you work, and change is difficult. You need to have a clear understanding of the motivation for change, what changes make sense, what changes are of lower priority, how to introduce change, and how to measure success in terms of improved project results.

To achieve improved project results, you often need to roll out not only an improved process, but also supporting tools. Organizations that do not understand the relationship between process and tools will likely fail to achieve any tangible benefits from their process improvement effort. There is only so much process improvement you can do without improved tool automation (see the section Achieve Effective Return on Investment Through Tool Automation, later in this chapter). If your project is a pilot project in a bigger rollout of a process and tools, you should also read the section Pilot Projects, below, for more specific guidelines.



The Rational Unified Process Made Easy(c) A Practitioner's Guide to Rational Unified Process
Programming Microsoft Visual C++
ISBN: N/A
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 173

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