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Appendix E. Requirements Management in the Rational Unified Process

With Philippe Kruchten and Leslee Probasco

This book provides an overview of a software requirements management best practice. The team skills described in the book, along with the requirements prescription provided in Chapter 31, will help your team start down the right path on your next project. However, to better ensure success, you need some way to reinforce and support the application of these best practices throughout the course of development. This must be accomplished in a way that integrates requirements management smoothly with other software development activities, including design, implementation, testing, and deployment. Ideally, this information would be provided online, in the team's desktop environment. Further, it would be prescriptive in describing which team members performed which activities and when they needed to produce the outputs of these activities for other team members to use. This is the role of a software development process . In this appendix, we look at an example of an industrial software development process, the Rational Unified Process, and see how the skills we have presented map into it.

The Rational Unified Process, a software engineering process developed and commercialized by the Rational Software Corporation [2002], captures some of the best practices of the industry for software development. It is use case driven and takes an iterative approach to the software development lifecycle. It embraces object-oriented techniques, and many of its activities focus on the development of models , all described using the UML. The Rational Unified Process is a descendant of Objectory [Jacobson et al. 1992] and of the Rational Approach. It has benefited over the years from the contributions of many industry experts, including the authors of this book and the teams from Requisite, Inc., SQA, Inc., and many others.

As a product, the Rational Unified Process is a Web-enabled guidebook that brings process guidance directly onto the desktops of software developers. It is composed of approximately 2,800 files presenting an HTML-based interactive desktop coach, which can be tailored to suit the needs of a wide range of software development organizations.

Although it uses slightly different terminology from that presented in this book, the Rational Unified Process provides an effective implementation of the requirements management best practices we offered , in a form that can be readily applied by software development teams.

The Structure of the Rational Unified Process ^[1]

^[1] This section is extracted from Philippe Kruchten, The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1999), pp. 35 “48, and reproduced with permission from the publisher.

A process describes who is doing what, how, and when . The Rational Unified Process is described using four key modeling elements (Figure E-1):

Role, the who
Activities, the how
Artifacts, the what
Disciplines, the when

Figure E-1. Roles, activities, and artifacts

graphics/efig01.gif

A role defines the behavior and responsibilities of an individual or a group of individuals working together as a team. The behavior is expressed in terms of activities the worker performs , and each worker is associated with a set of cohesive activities. The responsibilities of each worker are expressed in relation to certain artifacts , or work products, that the worker creates, modifies, or controls.

Disciplines allow the grouping of activities into meaningful sets that provide some result for the development organization and show how various workers interact. Beyond these four main concepts, the Rational Unified Process introduces specific techniques in the form of guidelines mapped to activities, templates for major artifacts, and tool mentors , that is, guidance on how to proceed using software development tools.