No Fixed Workflows

What remains constant across all RUP projects are these major milestones. What you must achieve by the end of each phase should be every team member's main concern. This does not mean that there is in the RUP a fixed workflow, a fixed "recipe," or a predefined set of activities that must be run in each phase. The RUP offers a palette of possibilities, but the context of your project will determine what you will actually use during the phase to achieve its objectives. From one development cycle to another, or from one project to another, the context will be different, and the risks will be different; so which artifacts you start with, the size of the project, its duration, and the number of involved parties will all play a role in dictating what must actually be executed and which artifacts must be produced or revisited.

Of course, in the RUP there are some common process fragments that are replicated across the lifecycle:

• Activities to start and close a project, a phase, or an iteration, and reviews

• Activities related to the detailed design, coding, testing, and integrating of software

• Activities related to Configuration Management, production of releases, and Change Management

These, however, are ancillary to what you need to achieve in that particular project phase.

The worst situation is the case of a project team trying to run the whole RUP and blindly developing all possible artifacts and executing all activities. By forgetting to tailor the RUP product to suit their context exactly, the team is running a high-overhead project, is overburdened very early, and is at risk of failing. You must streamline the RUP to be as low ceremony as suitable for your project (see Chapters 3 and 10).