Three Types of Projects

In the next four chapters, to give you a better feel of the activities that can take place in each phase, we will use three different examples of RUP projects:

• Project Ganymede, a green-field ^[1] development of a small application. The initial development cycle of a brand-new application where everything, including the requirements, have to be designed from scratch.

  ^[1] "Green-field" development refers to developing a new application. The alternative to green-field development is to develop a new version of an existing application ("brown-field").

• Project Mars, a green-field development of a larger system so that we can articulate the major difference with the first example.

• Project Jupiter, an evolution cycle of an existing large application (the "version 2.0"); this is more representative of a large number of RUP projects, which only evolve existing systems and do not create them from scratch.

There are many more types of projects; the combinations are infinite, but these three types should suffice to give you an idea about the evolving dynamics of a RUP project through its cycle.

When diving into the next four chapters, remember that the focus of each phase is to achieve some key milestone. These milestones have more to do with mitigating risks and achieving some concrete and objective progress toward the delivery of high-quality software than simply completing a wide range of artifacts and to "tick the box" on some arbitrary, predefined checklist.