Purpose

The implementation discipline has four purposes:

• To define the organization of the code in terms of implementation subsystems organized in layers

• To implement classes and objects in terms of components (source files, binaries, executables, and others)

• To test the developed components as units

• To integrate into an executable system the results produced by individual implementers or teams

The scope of test within the implementation discipline is limited to unit test of individual components. System test and integration test are described in the test discipline (see Chapter 12). This is because the implementer is responsible for unit test. Remember that, in practice, the workflows are interwoven.

To explain implementation in the Rational Unified Process, we introduce the following three key concepts:

• Builds

• Integration

• Prototypes