Rational Unified Process (RUP)

The Rational Unified Process (RUP) provides a disciplined approach to assigning tasks and
responsibilities within a development organization. Its goal is to ensure the production of high-
quality software that meets the needs of its end-users, within a predictable schedule and budget.

In RUP model a software product is designed and built in a succession of incremental iterations.
It incorporates early testing and validation of design ideas and early risk mitigation.
The horizontal dimension represents the dynamic aspect of the process. This includes cycles,
phases, iterations, and milestones. The vertical dimension represents the static aspect of the
process described in terms of process components which include activities, disciplines, artifacts,
and roles. All activities are performed in parallel, however, and at a given time one activity may
have more emphasis than the other.

The phases in the Rational Unified Process are:

Inception:

 Establish project scope and boundary conditions, including operational concepts, and
acceptance criteria
 Determine the critical use cases and primary scenarios of behavior that drive the system
functionality
 Estimate the overall cost and schedule for the entire project
 Identify potential risks (the sources of unpredictability)
 Prepare the supporting environment for the project

Elaboration:

 Define, validate and baseline the architecture as rapidly as is practical

 Baseline the vision
  Baseline a high-fidelity plan for the construction phase
 Refine support environment
 Demonstrate that the baseline architecture will support the vision at a reasonable cost in a
reasonable time

Construction:

 Complete the software product for transition to user

 Minimize development costs by optimizing resources and avoiding unnecessary scrap
and rework
 Achieve adequate quality as rapidly as is practical
 Achieve useful versions (alpha, beta, and other test releases) as rapidly as possible

Transition:

 Achieve user self-supportability

 Achieve stakeholder concurrence that deployment baselines are complete and consistent
with the evaluation criteria of the vision
 Achieve final product baseline as rapidly and cost-effectively as practical

Workflow Description
Business modelling The business processes are modelled using business use cases.
Actors who interact with the system are identified and use cases are
Requirements
developed to model the system requirements.
A design model is created and documented using architectural models;
Analysis and design
component models; object models and sequence models.
The components in the system are implemented and structured into
Implementation implementation sub-systems. Automatic code generation from design
models helps accelerate this process.
Testing is an iterative process that is carried out in conjunction with
Testing implementation. System testing follows the completion of the
implementation.
A product release is created; distributed to users and installed in their
Deployment
workplace.
Configuration and
This supporting workflow managed changes to the system
change management
Project management This supporting workflow manages the system
This workflow is concerned with making appropriate software tools
Environment
available to the software development team.

Advantages
  Efficient use of resources
 Less development time required
 Heavy emphasis on documentation (UML)
 Can embrace incremental releases
 Evolutionary approach can lead to clean implementations

Disadvantages
 The process may be too complex to implement
 Heavy documentation can be expensive
 Expert team members required