Phases
The RUP phases are shown on the horizontal axis in Figure | 1. RUP is an incremental process where the time spent on working on a project is broken down into phases and iterations:
| A phase marks a major stage in the process where specific disciplines are emphasized and specific artifacts are produced. Each phase is broken down into iterations that are time boxed and that can vary in duration from one week to many weeks, depending on the project.
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| The number of iterations in each phase also varies depending on the specific project. Typically there are more iterations in the Elaboration and Construction phases than in the Inception and Transition phases. Inception is typical one iteration, but in very large projects can be more than one.
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| The graphs give an indication of the effort expended in each discipline at each phases and iteration. Effort can be expended in each discipline in any iteration and in any phase but as can be seen from the graphs disciplines have peaks and troughs depending on the specific phase. Tasks undertaken as part of the requirements discipline typically peak during inception but can still be undertaken even towards the end of construction. The implementation discipline tasks peak in the construction phase because they are concerned mainly with the creation and testing of source code.
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Each RUP phase has a specific purpose:
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| Inception. This is the first phase of RUP. The main purpose of this phase is to achieve concurrence among all stakeholders on the life cycle objectives for the project.
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| Elaboration. This is the second phase of RUP. The main purpose of this phase is to baseline the architecture of the system and provide a stable basis for the bulk of the design and implementation effort in the next phase.
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| Construction. This is the third phase of RUP. The main purpose of this phase is to complete the development of the system based upon the baselined architecture.
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| Transition. This is the fourth and final phase of RUP. The main purpose of this phase is to ensure that software is ready for delivery to its users.
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One of the ways in which RUP guarantees the development of quality software is that it requires that at the end of each iteration a build of the application is available (working software) with certain known functionality.
RUP describes in detail the individual artifacts to be produced by the tasks that are undertaken in each discipline as well as the specific roles involved with each task. One task mentioned previously was Implement Design Elements. The role involved with this task is Implementor, and one of the artifacts produced is Implementation Element. Implementation element artifacts, as stated in the RUP documentation, are the physical parts that make up an implementation, including both files and directories. They include software code files (source, binary or executable), data files, and documentation files, such as online help files.
RUP is not only a process framework that can be used to organize and structure a software development project. RUP is also a complete description of the process itself and provides:
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| Guidelines for all team members. Guidance is provided for both the high-level thought process, as well as for more tedious day to day activities. The guidance is published in HTML form for easy platform independent access on your desktop.
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| Tool mentors. Tool mentors provide additional guidance when working with any of the software development tools offered by IBM Rational, such as Rational Application Developer for software development and Rational ClearCase for configuration management.
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| Templates and examples. These are provided for all major process artifacts.
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