A Process Framework

With this structure, the Rational Unified Process constitutes a process framework . Roles, artifacts, activities, guidelines, concepts, and mentors are the elements that you can add or replace to evolve or adapt the process to the organization's needs. They are the building blocks of the knowledge that you can use to capture and package process know-how in the form of process components and "compile" those in process plug-ins. The way to do this is developed in Chapter 14, The Environment Discipline.

The organization of the Rational Unified Process that we described in this chapter is based on an industry standard called the Software Process Engineering Metamodel ( SPEM ), ^[2] developed around 2000 by a group of companies, including Rational Software and IBM. SPEM is an object-oriented metamodel in UML, as well as a UML profile.

^[2] Object Management Group. Software Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM) . OMG, doc ad/01-03-08, April 2, 2001.