How Can RUP and EPF Help Me?

How Can RUP and EPF Help Me?<title/>

OpenUP/Basic is a simplified version of the Unified Process.

EPF is an open source process framework for authoring, configuring, publishing, and viewing software practices and processes. One of the processes in EPF is OpenUP/Basic, which is a stripped-down, simplified version of the Unified Process, suitable for smaller teams looking for an agile development approach consistent with Unified Process principles. Even though the practices in this book are process agnostic, they are well aligned with RUP and OpenUP/Basic. You find that many of the basic and sometimes intermediate levels of practices in this book are consistent with OpenUP/Basic.

EPF enables scalable processes and process frameworks to be built on top of it.

EPF also enables scalable processes and process frameworks to be built on top of it. One such scalable process framework is RUP. ^[1] RUP can be daunting at first glance, providing guidance on hundreds of best practices. These best practices are integrated into a coherent, full lifecycle process, allowing you to scale from the needs of smaller projects to those of large and complex projects. Through a clear articulation of roles, artifacts, and activities, team members understand what they need to produce and how to produce it. Tool mentors provide guidance on how best to leverage the tools at hand to carry out the work. The coherent story ensures that team members understand how to execute a project from start to finish.

^[1] Kroll 2003

It is, however, not obvious from OpenUP/Basic and RUP how to take out a small slice and adopt only that thin slice. That is really what we are trying to achieve with this book. Each practice in this book represents a slice of OpenUP/Basic and RUP, articulates what problem that slice is solving, and provides pragmatic guidance on how to solve the problems. The practices help you improve your software effort by attacking one problem at a time. Each practice describes how OpenUP/Basic and RUP can help you adopt the practice and also references other processes such as XP ^[2] and Scrum ^[3] so that you can understand differences and similarities between what the practice and other processes suggest. Work is going on to incorporate these and other processes into the EPF, which will provide you with a broader set of practices and processes to choose fromsome consistent with this book, some not. This development will help drive innovation and will provide users of EPF with a broader set of tools to choose from.

^[2] See Beck 2004.

^[3] 3 See Schwaber 2002.

OpenUP/Basic and RUP provide details of how to execute the practice.

OpenUP/Basic and RUP provide the details on how to execute the practicethe roles responsible, the step-by-step tasks to be performed, templates for the artifacts to be produced. Throughout the book you can incrementally adopt more and more practices. As you do so, you will discover that you are adopting a larger percentage of first OpenUP/Basic and then RUP. At some stage you will find that you are ready to adopt large chunks of RUP,^[4] such as a whole discipline. The book is a springboard, allowing you to jump more effectively into the land of RUP without getting overwhelmed.

^[4] See Bergstrom 2004 for more information on adopting RUP.

As you are following OpenUP/Basic and RUP, you can use the practices in this book to understand which aspects of OpenUP/Basic and RUP to focus on.