Overview of the Process

Overview of the Process

Figure 2-1 shows the high-level view of the development process.

Figure 2-1. Outline Development Process
graphics/02fig01.gif

This process is an iterative and incremental development process, in that the software is not released in one big bang at the end of the project but is, instead, developed and released in pieces. The construction phase consists of many iterations, in which each iteration builds production-quality software, tested and integrated, that satisfies a subset of the requirements of the project. The delivery may be external, to early users, or purely internal. Each iteration contains all the usual life-cycle phases of analysis, design, implementation, and testing.

In principle, you can start at the beginning: Pick some functionality and build it, pick some other functionality, and so forth. However, it is worthwhile to spend some time planning.

The first two phases are inception and elaboration. During inception, you establish the business rationale for the project and decide on the scope of the project. This is where you get the commitment from the project sponsor to go further. In elaboration, you collect more detailed requirements, do high-level analysis and design to establish a baseline architecture, and create the plan for construction.

Even with this kind of iterative process, some work has to be left to the end, in the transition phase. This work can include beta testing, performance tuning, and user training.

Projects vary in how much ceremony they have. High-ceremony projects have a lot of formal paper deliverables, formal meetings, formal sign-offs. Low-ceremony projects might have an inception phase that consists of an hour 's chat with the project's sponsor and a plan that sits on a spreadsheet. Naturally, the bigger the project, the more ceremony you need. The fundamentals of the phases still occur, but in very different ways.

I try to keep the ceremony to a minimum, and my discussion reflects that. There are plenty of high-ceremony processes to choose from elsewhere.

I've shown iterations in the construction phase, but not in the other phases. In fact, you can have iterations in all phases, and it is often a good idea to do so in a large phase. Construction is the key phase in which to iterate, however.

That's the high-level view. Now we will delve into the details so that we have enough information to see where the techniques discussed later in the book fit into the larger scheme of things. In doing this, I will talk a bit about these techniques and when to use them. You may find it a little confusing if you are unfamiliar with the techniques. If that's the case, skip those bits and come back to them later.



UML Distilled[c] A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language
The Unified Modeling Language User Guide (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)
ISBN: 0201571684
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 119

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