Summary

This chapter introduces key principles and practices that support them. It also presents the framework for this book, as outlined below:

• Comparison with other methods. For each practice, we describe how the practice is similar to, or different from, other methods.

• Levels of adoption. Each practice can be adopted at three levels: basic, intermediate, and advanced. The advanced level typically requires a combination of more advanced skills, more advanced tooling, or a higher-ceremony process.

• Process map. For each level of adoption of a practice, we indicate whether the practice enables agility or discipline and whether it enables shorter iterations.

• Information in the Unified Process. For each practice, we describe how OpenUP/Basic and RUP support these practices.

To enable you to make better use of this framework, this chapter provides a summary of the Unified Process lifecycle, OpenUP/Basic, and RUP and explains how they fit together in the family of Unified Process methods built on EPF and RMC. This chapter also summarizes Scrum and XP, because we have chosen to focus on these methods as part of the "comparison with other methods" section in each practice.

With this background, we hope you can now pick and choose a practice chapter of interest and gain valuable insight into how to improve your process. We recommend that you start with the basic level of adoption and incrementally adopt some intermediate and advanced practices based on whether you need to be more iterative, agile, or disciplined.