What are Six Best Practices in Rational Unified Process?

The IBM Rational Unified Process is a means of commercial deployment of the approaches and practices which have been proven for the development of the software systems and applications. It is based up on the following six best practices:

1. Iterative development of the software systems and applications
2. Management of the requirements
3. Use of architecture based up on the components.
4. Visual modeling of the software system
5. Verification of the software system.
6. Controlling the changes to the software system or application.

The above mentioned practices are called the best practices not because their value can be precisely quantified but because they are quite common in the software industry by most of the organizations which are successful and reputable.

In the rational unified process each and every member of the team gets templates, guidelines as well as the tools which are found necessary for the whole of the team in order to reap the full advantage.

Basic Practices In Rational Unified Process in Detail

Iterative development of the software systems or applications:  

- Software systems and applications are quite sophisticated and therefore they make it impossible to define the problem first in sequence.

- By sequence we mean, first defining the whole problem, designing a solution of the problem, building the software system or application and then finally testing the software system. 

- In order to deal with such software systems and applications there is a requirement of an iterative approach so that an increase in the understanding of the problem can be made in a series of successive refinements. 

- This also helps in developing an effective solution in increments done over multiple iterations.

Management of the Requirements: 

The rational unified process gives a description:

- On how the elicitation, organization and documentation of the constraints as well as the functionality is to be done, 

- how the trade-offs and decisions have to be tracked and documented and 

- how the business requirements are to be captured and communicated.

Use of architecture based up on the components: 

- The focus of the development process is on the base-lining and early development of an architecture that is robust and executable as well. 

- It gives a description of how a resilient architecture can be built with more flexibility that can accommodate the changes easily, can be easily understood and effectively promotes the reuse of the existing software artifacts. 

- The rational unified process provides a great support to the component based development. 

- By components we mean, the sub systems and non – trivial elements for a clear function.

Visual modeling of the software system: 

- The rational unified shows you exactly how a software system or application can be visually modeled and can be used for capturing the behavior and structure of its architectural components. 

- This further enables you to hide the details and develop the code with the help of the graphical building blocks. 

- With such visual abstractions, communication can be established between the different aspects of the software system or application.

Verification of the software system: 

- Poor reliability dramatically cuts down the chances of a software system or application from being accepted.

- Therefore it is important to review the quality concerning the factors namely functionality, reliability, system performance and application performance etc.

Controlling the changes to the software system or application: 

- The management and ability to track the changes are critical to the success of any software system or application. 

- However, the rational unified process helps you to cope with these issues also.

What are Rational Unified Process building blocks?

Whenever we talk about iterative software development process frame works, the first name that comes to our minds is of the rational unified process. It is not just a single hard coded prescriptive process rather it is quite an adaptable and flexible process frame work. 

This frame work comes with several facilities, the best one being that your organization can tailor it according to their needs. 

What is Rational Unified Process?

- Unified process when specifically implemented is called as the rational unified process. 

- Rational unified process is counted among the best products of IBM and the credit for its development goes to the rational software division.

- The RUP comes with a hyper linked base consisting of the descriptions of several types of activities and a few sample artifacts. 

- A part of the IBM’s rational method composer (RMC) is occupied by the rational unified process.

- It allows the users to customize the process as per their needs. 

What are building blocks of Rational Unified Process?

In this article we are to talk about the building blocks of the rational unified process.

- These basic best practices of the rational unified process were developed as a result of the combination of the experience of many companies. 

- The building blocks are:

1. Iterative development with risk as its primary iteration driver.
2. Management of the requirements.
3. Employment of an architecture based up on components.
4. Visual modeling of the software.
5. Continuous verification of the quality.
6. Controlling the changes

- These best practices are used in the following two ways:

1. For driving the development process of the rational’s products.
2. To be used by the rational’s field teams so as to assist the customers in improving the predictability as well as the quality of the software development efforts.

- The task involves the assembling of the explicit process framework for the field of modern software engineering. 

- The delivery mechanism developed by the objector was based up on the HTML and employed in accomplishing this task.

- This task resulted in the creation of the rational unified process. 

- A set of content elements or the building blocks form the foundation for the rational unified process and give a description of the product that is to be produced and the required necessary skills. 

- They also give a detailed step by step explanation for achieving the specific development goals. 

Now we shall list all the building blocks of the rational unified process and discuss them in detail:

1. Roles: This building block can be defined as set consisting of related skills, responsibilities as well as competencies.
2. Work products: This building block gives the representation of thing that would result when a task would be completed inclusive of all the models and documentation produced during the course of the completion of that task.
3. Tasks: This building block gives a description of the units of works that are assigned to an element from the role which will produce a result that would be meaningful.

There are 9 disciplines in to which the tasks are categorized within each iteration. There are 6 engineering disciplines and 3 supporting disciplines which together make up total 9 disciplines. The 6 engineering disciplines are:

1. Business modeling
2. Requirements
3. Analysis and design
4. Implementation
5. Test and
6. Deployment

The following are the three supporting disciplines:

1. Configuration and change management
2. Environment and
3. Project management

The organization and the management of the above mentioned building blocks need to be solid and flexible in order to make the rational unified process a success which otherwise cannot be achieved. 

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. 

What are the characteristics of the unified process?

- Unified process is one of the most popular software development frame works based on the iterative and incremental approach.

- Unified process is a frame work that is extensible according to the needs of the software development project or according to the needs of the specific organizations. 

- The unified process signifies the generic processes that include elements that have been declared common for most of the refinements. 

- The unified process was first discussed in detail in a book called “the unified software development process” in the year of 1999. 

- Every process has got some characteristics and so does the unified process.

Characteristics of Unified Process

1. Iterative and Incremental Process: 

- There is no doubt believing that the unified process is an iterative and incremental one. 

- This is evident from the fact that the all the below mentioned 4 phases of the whole process are divided in to a set of time boxed iterations:

(a)  Inception

(b)  Elaboration

(c)  Construction and

(d)  Transition

- Depending up on the complexity and the size of the project, the inception phase may also be further divided in to a large number of small iterations to keep the over all development process as simple as possible. 

- The increments are the result of the individual iterations that are performed during the whole development process.

- These increments can be defined as a system containing improved and added functionalities that extend over those that were present in the previous version of the same software system or application.

- Mostly the iterations take care of the following aspects of the software:

       (a)  Requirements

       (b)  Testing

       (c)  Design implementation and so on.

2. Use case driven: 

- The unified process is rightly called the use case driven software development methodology since it is driven by the use cases that are quite effective in capturing the contents of the iterations and the functional requirements.

- Each iteration involves a number of use cases as well as scenarios for the proper identification of the requirements, their implementation, testing and deployment.

3. Risk Focused: 

- The unified process requires that the most critical risks in the whole development cycle are focused up on in the early stages of the life cycle of the process. 

- For addressing the factors with the highest risk rating, the deliverable of all the iterations especially in the second phase of the life cycle i.e., the elaboration phase are selected in a pre-defined order.

4. Architecture Centric: 

- It is obvious that the success of any software development process is greatly dependent on what kind of architecture is being used in it. 

- Architecture seems to work the very best at the heart of any software development process. - With the right architecture in the process, the efforts of the teams can shape the software system or application the way they want. 

- One problem is encountered here which is that only one model never suffices in providing coverage in a unified process, several models have to be conjoined and used. 

- It is one of the attractive features of the unified process that it supports multiple architectural views and models. 

- The elaboration phase witnesses the creation of an executable architecture baseline which can be called as an important deliverable. 

What are the strengths and weaknesses of scrum?

Even though a lot of programmers and developers have been opting out for using scrum for the development of their projects, they had always faced some problems when implementing the scrum processes. These problems more or less are a consequence of the weaknesses of the scrum development method. 

However, in comparison to the weaknesses, the scrum has more number of strengths or plus points and this is what that makes the scrum so popular among the programmers and developers in spite of its weaknesses. 

According to a research, scrum was find to be weak in scrum training and certification. As we all know the scrum has always been looked up on as one of the best ways to implement the agile principles in the development process. All these modern agile software development processes like the waterfall, spiral and iterative models are quite different from the traditional approaches to software development. 

Problems and Misconceptions faced by Scrum Methodology

- One thing that really makes the scrum implementation weak is that programmers and developers think that implementing scrum itself is equal to agile implementation which is absolutely wrong! 

- Any software development process on a whole cannot be considered to be a complete agile process until and unless all the disciplines and rules of the agile management have been incorporated in to the development process.

- When one takes the scrum process to be equal to the agile process, then the agile disciplines go missing from the development process without the knowledge of the developer. 

- The developer thinks that he had implemented all the aspects of the agile management via the scrum which is a very false perception. 

- Many people do not understand that scrum is a software development process meant to achieve the goals of agility. 

- Scrum is a means and not a goal in itself. 

- Implementing the scrum without knowing about it in depth is like drawing up an empty process which takes you nowhere except that your time and efforts are wasted.

- When the scrum is simply thought of as a process so many formal activities that are carried out are a total waste. 

- There is another aspect to this weakness! This weakness in some cases becomes the strength of the scrum process making several problems visible to the developers. 

- But this is not the usual case since some developers may identify the problems found, themselves. 

- Plus if such problems are discovered during the implementation of the scrum then one more thing is obvious that the communication between the team members is not fluent and effective. 

Some developers and programmers may also blame the scrum for such problems. Here below we have summarized all the strengths and weaknesses of the scrum:

      

        1. Strengths:

a)  Encourages team work.

b)  Maintains transparency of the development process.

c)   Breaks down hierarchies.

d)  Keeps a focus on user features. (this is a weakness also in some cases)

e)  It is adaptive.

f)   Encourages visibility of the development.

      2.Weaknesses:

a)  Keeps a focus on user features: Focus on user features to some extent is ok but what if the process is totally in to it? A slow and clean approach always seems difficult to a team! Non functional requirements can be ignored since they don’t have any direct impact on the user.

b)   With scrum every team member needs to forget about his/ her area of expertise.

c)   Scrum is more useful to the companies that are product based rather than other aspects.

What is a scrum process and how does it work?

To implement the scrum development process, it is important to know how it actually works. Most of the errors in the development occur because of the lack of knowledge about the working process of the scrum. 

Scrum works on the principle of iterative and incremental development and it operates with the help of two types of roles namely:

1. Core roles:

(i)                Scrum master

(ii)              Development team

(iii)            Product owner

2. Ancillary roles:

(i)                Stake holders and

(ii)              Managers

What is a scrum process?

- The scrum process deals in terms of sprints which are usually called iterations for the other agile software development processes. 

- In a typical scrum, a sprint may have duration of a week to a month. 

- Scrum is facilitated by various meetings which have been mentioned below:

1. Daily scrum: 

This meeting is held during the sprint and is based up on the project status. Usually the core roles participate in this meeting. This meeting is time boxed to 15 minutes.

2. Story time (back log grooming): 

This process involves the estimation of the existing backlog and the acceptance criteria for the user stories is also refined. These meetings are time boxed to an hour.

3. Scrum of scrums: 

This meeting follows after daily scrum and is somewhat same.

4. Sprint planning meeting: 

This meeting is held before the beginning of every sprint and the tasks that have to be completed within that sprint are selected.

5. Sprint review meeting: 

It reviews the status of the sprint and also the tasks that could not be completed.

Principles on which working of scrum depends

The scrum follows the following three principles throughout its working:

1. Working software is more valuable then the documentation.
2. Response to the changes in requirements is more important than the plan.
3. Team collaboration is important than contract negotiation.

How does a scrum process work?

- Usually the first few weeks of the scrum are spent working out the high level requirements including business needs and system architecture. 

- After this, the team produces the product backlog and sprint backlog. 

- These two backlogs together make the scope of the software project by the end of the week. - All the team member themselves take up the responsibilities and operational activities from each other during the daily meetings. 

- At the end of some sprints, it happens that some of the tasks could not be completed as planned so they have to be included in the next sprint in addition to the other tasks. 

- One of the reasons for such situations is the “scope creep”. 

- However, this does not turns out to be a real issue especially when the team is working closely with the business owners who have good understanding of the development process going on. 

- It should be understood that the scrum is a framework rather than just being a full methodology. 

- A detail of everything that is to be done is not provided by the client since it is decided by the team itself.

- At the end of the sprints the coding, testing, integration of the features is done. 

- In the sprint review, the newly added features to the software are demonstrated to the product owner. 

Reasons why scrum works well

There are several reasons why scrum works and few of them have been mentioned below:

1. Iterative nature.
2. Re assessment of priorities between iterations.
3. The old check points are discarded when the team is doing something new.
4. Availability of the product owner.
5. The development team works on a single project at a time.
6. The team has a chance to co- locate the entire development process.

What are different scrum controls?

It happens in some of the cases that the whole scrum process comes on the verge of the collapsing! In such cases it is required that the management controls stay in order, undisturbed and firm all the times. 

There are many scrum controls; however the risk assessment continues to be the most valuable one with its impacts as well.

What are different Scrum Controls?

The below mentioned are the effective scrum controls:

1. Issues: 

Issues can be thought of as the obstacles that do not pose any major risk, defect or bug but cannot be considered to be a positive aspect for the software project.

2. Risk assessment: 

This is the most influential scrum control also as it influences the other scrum controls quite much. The success of the project depends largely up on this scrum control as well its impacts.

3. Packets: 

These are product elements pending for the modification in order to facilitate the implementation of the product backlog items in to the working software that is to be released at the end of the sprint.

4. Backlog: 

This backlog consists of all the details of the bugs, defects and the requests of the customers that could not be implemented in the current release and have to be incorporated in to the next release. In addition to all these, the backlogs also consist of the technology and functionality upgrades.

5. Solutions: 

These are the scrum controls occurring between the risks, problems and changes.

6. Release and Enhancement: 

After the risk assessment, this is the second most valuable scrum control for the entire development cycle. This scrum control at any point of time represents a viable release based up on the requirement variables.

How does these scrum controls help?

- Most of the above mentioned scrum controls are employed for the management of the product backlogs and the sprint backlogs. 

- These scrum controls are used for the following purposes:

1. Managing issues
2. Obtaining better solutions

- Even these controls are reviewed from time to time and modified or reconciled if and whenever required during the sprint planning meetings. 

- These scrum controls help control chaos that occurs during the development process. 

- All the above mentioned scrum controls play a great role in the following stages of the scrum:

1. Defined processes
2. Project cost
3. Final product
4. Responsiveness to the environment
5. Completion date
6. Knowledge transfer
7. Team flexibility creativity
8. Probability of success

Scrum, we can say is an enhanced version of the iterative and incremental object oriented development cycle. 

The software releases in a scrum are planned according to the below mentioned variables:

1. Time pressure: Time frame required to make most of the competitive advantage.
2. Quality
3. Resource: It includes staff availability and funds.
4. Vision (system vision)
5. Competition: What is required to gain the competitive edge?
6. Customer requirements: How the current system can be enhanced?

All the above mentioned can be modified according to the development plan during the project. But any processes carried out further should take these changed variables in to account. A system that requires a complicate and complex development process require appropriate control and maximum and efficient control.