Objective 4: Refine the Development Case, and Put the Development Environment in Place

During Inception, you defined what process to follow and documented your way of using the RUP approach in a development case. You also defined what tools to use and did necessary tool customizations. In Elaboration, you walked through the full lifecycle, doing some design, implementation, and testing of the architecture. You also put your code base under Configuration Management.

To support these activities, you complete the installation and rollout of the process and tools that you initiated, and as you walk through the lifecycle, you learn both what works well for your project and what does not work well. You understand how to improve the process and what tuning and further customizations are necessary for your tools. You update your development case accordingly and fine-tune your tool implementation.

For each of our three example projects, you do the following:

Project Ganymede, a small green-field project: The team members get together and spend an hour discussing how they liked the process and tool environment used in Inception. After the meeting, the project manager/architect updates the development case to cover the Elaboration phase as well, outlining what artifacts should be produced, what templates to use, and how to document the information. Also in this phase, the project manager/architect functions as a mentor for the rest of the team, helping them with adopting the process and tools.
Project Mars, a large green-field project: The mentor of the project talks with various team members to get some feedback on what worked well and what did not work well during Inception. Based on the feedback, the mentor updates the development case for the project. The mentor uses the development case to influence any training delivered during Elaboration.
Project Jupiter, a second generation of a large project: The project manager talks with various team members to get some feedback on what worked well and what did not work well during Inception. Based on the feedback, the project manager updates the development case and walks through any updates with the team. Most team members are familiar with the process and tools, so no training is needed.