| Process managers, process engineers, or content owners must determine the appropriate process for various teams within the organization. To accomplish this, the process manager requires breadth of content and the ability to customize the process to the needs of different project types, as follows: Breadth of content. To address the breadth of process needs of organizations, teams need to reuse best practices that work for other organizations rather than inventing everything from scratch. RMC provides a foundation of enterprise-level process content, which is supplemented by commercial and open source plug-ins from IBM and others. RMC also allows organizations to capture their own best practices by seamlessly extending the RMC content libraries. Customizability. It is not enough to have a lot of content; you also need to be able to leverage that content to execute projects of different types effectively. This goal is achieved by enabling process managers, process engineers, and content owners to package content into reusable capability patterns and to construct delivery processes for various project types out of capability patterns.
| RMC allows organizations to capture their own best practices. |
History of the RMC Product The evolution of RMC has gone through a number of phases: Phase 1: 19871996. In 1987, the company Objectory AB launched the Objectory process[4] (principal author Ivar Jacobson). The process focused on business modeling, requirements, analysis, and design, and was formally modeled using object-oriented techniques, which later allowed us to make the process customizable and extensible. The process was use-case-driven, to ensure that the requirements were not only captured but also designed, implemented, and tested. Phase 2: 19961999. In 1995 Rational Software Corporation acquired Objectory and started to integrate the Objectory process with the Rational Approach.[5]. The Rational Approach (principal authors Grady Booch, Walker Royce, and Philippe Kruchten) was an iterative and architecture-driven process that used the four phases currently in RUP. The result was launched in 1996 under the name Rational Objectory Process (with Philippe Kruchten as developer manager and Per Kroll as product manager). Over the next four years Rational acquired a large number of companies, and integrated its processes into RUP, including requirements management content[6] (principal author Dean Leffingwell) from Requisite Inc., test content from SQA, and configuration and change management content from Pure-Atria. In 1998, the name was changed to Rational Unified Process as the process was made to support UML, and in 1999 RUP covered the full project lifecycle. Phase 3: 20002005. In 2000 we started to rely increasingly on partners for specialized content. We worked with Microsoft and Applied Information Sciences to create a WinDNA version of RUP and with IBM, BEA, and Sun Microsystems to create a J2EE version of RUP. As we worked with more and more partners, and as the customer base expanded, we needed a more sophisticated process environment. In 2001 we launched authoring and configuring tools, allowing content producers to develop content plug-ins and consumers to configure a process from plug-ins. A large number of plug-ins were made available, and many companies did extensive customizations of RUP. Phase 4: 2005. In 2005 we completely rebuilt the process tooling, with the capabilities described above. The process content expanded beyond RUP, to include, among other things, portfolio management content and content from SUMMIT Ascendant. The name of the product was changed to IBM Rational Method Composer to reflect these changes. In 2006 the RMC product was localized to nine languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. In 2005, the EPF open source project was created with +20 organizations supporting the effort within the first few months.
|
[4] Jacobson 1994.
[5] Devlin 1995.
[6] Leffingwell 2000.
|
