A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE RATIONAL UNIFIED PROCESS

The Rational Unified Process has matured over the years and reflects the collective experience of the many people and companies that today make up Rational Software's rich heritage. Let us take a quick look at the rich ancestry of RUP 2000, as illustrated in Figure 2-3.

Figure 02fig03. Genealogy of the Rational Unified Process

Going backward in time, the Rational Unified Process (version 5) is the direct successor to the Rational Objectory Process (version 4). The Rational Unified Process incorporates more material in the areas of data engineering, business modeling, project management, and configuration management, the latter as a result of a merger with Pure-Atria. It includes elements of the Real-Time Object-Oriented Method, developed by the founders of ObjecTime, acquired by Rational in 2000. It also brings a tighter integration to the Rational Software suite of tools.

The Rational Objectory Process 4.0 was the result of the integration of the Rational Approach and the Objectory process (version 3.8) after the merger of Rational Software Corporation and Objectory AB in 1995. From its Objectory ancestry, the process has inherited its process model (described in Chapter 3) and the central concept of use case. From its Rational background, it gained the current formulation of iterative development and architecture. This version also incorporated material on requirements management from Requisite, Inc., and a detailed test process inherited from SQA, Inc., companies that also merged with Rational Software. Finally, this version of the process was the first to use the newly created Unified Modeling Language (UML 0.8).

The Objectory process was created in Sweden in 1987 by Ivar Jacobson as the result of his many years of experience at the Swedish telecommunications manufacturer Ericsson AB. This process became a product at his company, Objectory AB. Centered on the concept of use case and object-oriented design it rapidly gained recognition in the software industry and has been adopted and integrated by many companies worldwide. A simplified version of the Objectory process was published as a textbook in 1992. ^[4]

^[4] Ivar Jacobson et al., Object-Oriented Software Engineering: A Use-Case-Driven Approach . Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992.

The Rational Unified Process is a specific and detailed instance of a more generic process described by Ivar Jacobson, Grady Booch, and James Rumbaugh in the textbook The Unified Software Development Process. ^[5]

^[5] Ivar Jacobson, Grady Booch, and James Rumbaugh, The Unified Software Development Process . Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998.