Roles, activities, workflows, and artifacts, organized in disciplines, represent the backbone of the Rational Unified Process static structure. But other elements are added to activities or artifacts to make the process easier to understand and use and to provide more comprehensive guidance to the practitioners . These additional process elements are:
These elements enhance the primary elements, as shown in Figure 3-7. Figure 3-7. Adding templates, tool mentors, and guidelines
GuidelinesActivities and steps are kept brief and to the point because they are intended to serve as references for what needs to be done. Therefore, they must be useful for neophytes looking for guidance as well as for experienced practitioners needing a reminder. Attached to activities, steps, or artifacts are guidelines. Guidelines are rules, recommendations, or heuristics that support activities and steps. They describe well- formed artifacts, focusing on their specific qualities, for example, what constitutes a good use case or a good design class. Guidelines also describe specific techniques to create certain artifacts or the transformations from one artifact to another or the use of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Guidelines are used also to assess the quality of artifacts ”in the form of checklists associated with artifacts ”or to review activities. The following are types of guidelines:
Some guidelines need to be refined or specialized for a given organization or project to accommodate project specifics, such as the use of a particular technique or tool. The following are examples of this latter type of guideline:
TemplatesTemplates are models, or prototypes , of artifacts. Associated with the artifact description are one or more templates that can be used to create the corresponding artifacts. Templates are linked to the tool that is to be used. For example:
As with guidelines, organizations may want to customize the templates before using them by adding the company logo, some project identification, or information specific to the type of project. Tool MentorsActivities, steps, and associated guidelines provide general guidance to the practitioner. To go one step further, tool mentors are an additional means of providing guidance by showing you how to perform the steps using a specific software tool. Tool mentors are provided in the Rational Unified Process, linking its activities with tools such as Rational Rose, Rational XDE, RequisitePro, ClearCase, ClearQuest, and TestStudio. The tool mentors almost completely encapsulate the dependencies of the process on the tool set, keeping the activities free from tool details. A development organization can extend the concept of tool mentor to provide guidance for other tools. ConceptsSome of the key concepts, such as iteration, phase, artifact, risk, performance testing, and so on, are introduced in separate sections of the process, usually attached to the most appropriate discipline. Many of these concepts are also introduced in this book. |