Conclusion

At the end of Elaboration, the second of the RUP approach's four phases, you can look back and see that you made considerable progress, compared to where you were at the end of Inception. Here are the major achievements:

• You moved from a high-level understanding of the most important requirements to a detailed understanding of roughly 80 percent of the requirements.

• You moved from a potential and probably conceptual architecture to a baselined, executable architecture. This means you designed, implemented, and validated the architecture ”a skeleton structure of the system ”then produced a baseline of it.

• You mitigated a majority of architecturally significant risks and produced more accurate schedule/cost estimates for the remaining lifecycle phases. You used the Lifecycle Architecture Milestone to decide whether you should move ahead with the project, cancel it, or radically change it.

• You refined the development case and put the development environment in place.

• You had a small team of your most skilled people tackle the most difficult activities; you laid the groundwork for successful continuation of the project and for scaling it up with a minimum of financial, business, and technical risks.