The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw (1856 1950), Man and Superman (1903) The Rational Unified Process (Kruchten 2000) is swiftly becoming an industry standard for prescriptive software development. This makes sense, when you consider RUP's strengths: The RUP is based on sound software engineering principles, such as taking an iterative, requirements-driven, and architecture-based approach to development. The RUP provides opportunities for concrete management visibility. The most important opportunities include the creation of a working architectural prototype at the end of the elaboration phase, the creation of a working (partial) system at the end of each construction iteration, and the go/no-go decision point at the end of each phase. Rational Corporation (2003), now a division of IBM, has made, and continues to make, a significant investment in its RUP product, a collection of HTML pages and artifacts that your organization can tailor to meet its exact needs.
The Canaxia case study makes it very clear that the RUP unfortunately suffers from several weaknesses: The RUP is only a development process. Like most organizations, Canaxia is concerned not only with developing systems but also with operating and supporting them once in production. Furthermore, Canaxia has found that it eventually needs to retire systems as well. The RUP only includes phases for the development of systems, not the entire system life cycle. Multisystem development is missing. Canaxia is clearly interested in cross-system issues such as enterprise architecture, enterprise business modeling, and strategic reuse efforts, but the RUP does not explicitly include these activities. Multisystem management is missing. Canaxia has several IT projects underway at any given time and many more in the queue. Canaxia clearly needs to manage both its staff and its portfolio of projects, but once again the RUP doesn't include this.
Although the RUP may be adequate for the development of a single system, it is not adequate to meet the real-world needs of modern organizations. The RUP may become part of Canaxia's overall process solution, but it isn't the entire solution. Luckily you have a choice, the Enterprise Unified Process (EUP), which extends the RUP to address these critical issues. |
