Explain Rational Unified Process (RUP)?

Rational Unified Process development framework was developed by a division of IBM known as the rational software corporation. Rational Software Corporation has been a part of IBM since the year of 2003. 

About Rational Unified Process

- Rational unified process is a single process that has a concrete prescription.

- It is a process frame work which is adaptable to a large extent and can be tailored by the organizations and development corporations as per their needs. - They can select the elements of the process that they want to be present in their development approach. 

- The rational unified process or RUP is a product that is used to process other products. 

- This product is built on a hyper linked base of knowledge consisting of detailed description about a lot of activities along with some sample artifacts.  - Rational unified process constitutes a part of the IBM’s RMC product or rational method composer.

- It is used for customizing the rational unified process. 

- All the companies combined their experiences and declared 6 best practices that are known to drive the rational unified process. 

- Those 6 best practices are:

1. Iterative development where the risk is taken as the primary iteration driver.
2. Management of the requirements.
3. Employment of an architecture based up on component.
4. Visual modelling of the software system or application.
5. Continuous verification of the quality.
6. Controlling of the changes.

- The above mentioned 6 best practices are followed by the rational’s field teams in order to assist the customers in improving the predictability as well as quality of the efforts that they put for the development of the software.

- The resulting rational unified frame work had the following three main strategic characteristics:

1. This process is tailor-able for the effective guidance of the development process.
2. Consists of tools that are used for the automation of the process.
3. Involves services that accelerate and make the adoption of both the tools and processes easy.

- Rational unified process came into existence on the acquiring of the objector y process in the year of 1996 that was written by Ivar Jacobson. 

- This original process consisted of the content from the following three things:

1. Object modelling technology or OMT from Jim Rumbaugh,
2. Booch approach by Grady Booch and
3. UML 1.0

- Later the year of 1997 saw the addition of the test discipline and requirements to the approach. 

- Below mentioned are the additions to the approach that were made subsequently after the year of 1997:

1. Year 1998 saw the addition of two new disciplines namely configuration and change management discipline and business modelling. Other things that were added included the following techniques:

a)   Performance testing

b)   UI design

c)   Data engineering

Further the rational unified process was updated to 1.1 version of the UML.

2. Year of 1999 saw the addition of the project management discipline and techniques that supported the real time development of the software. Also the rational unified was again updated to UML 1.3.
3. From year 2000 onwards most of modifications were centered around the adding tool mentors, adding techniques along with a basic guide containing step by step instructions up on how the rational tools are to be used and how the customization of the rational unified process can be automated using which customers could customize their own process and at the same time incorporating improvements in the following releases.