Goals of This Book

In this book, you will

• learn what the Rational Unified Process is and what it is not;

• master the vocabulary of the Rational Unified Process and understand its structure;

• develop an appreciation for the best practices that we have synthesized in this process; and

• understand how the Rational Unified Process can give you the guidance you need for your specific responsibility in a project.

This book is not the complete Rational Unified Process. Rather, it is a small subset to introduce the RUP. In the full Rational Unified Process you will find the detailed guidance needed to carry out your work. The full Rational Unified Process ”the online knowledge base ” is a product that can be obtained from IBM.

This book makes numerous references to the Unified Modeling Language (UML), but it is not an introduction to the UML. That is the focus of two other books: The Unified Modeling Language User Guide (Addison-Wesley, 1999) and The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual (Addison-Wesley, 1999).

This introductory book speaks about modeling and object-oriented techniques, but it is not a design method, and it does not teach you how to model. Detailed steps and guidance on the various techniques that are embedded in the Rational Unified Process can be found only in the process product.

Several chapters of this book discuss project management issues. They describe aspects of planning an iterative development, managing risks, and so on. This book, however, is by no means a complete manual on project management and software economics. For more information, we refer you to the book Software Project Management: A Unified Framework (Addison-Wesley, 1998).

The Rational Unified Process is a specific and detailed instance of a more generic process described in the textbook The Unified Software Development Process (Addison-Wesley, 1998).