What is a Unified Process? What are key characteristics and guidelines for unified process?

If you might have heard even a little about the unified process, you must be having a clue that it has something to do with the development of software system or methodologies. Yes! Certainly it has to do not a little but all with the software development, after all it is one of the most sought after software development frame work.

Well! This article is all about the unified process. Unified process is actually the short name for the USDP or the unified software development process.

What is a Unified Process?

- This software development process has recently emerged as a very popular incremental and iterative software development process frame work. 

- There are some methodologies defined under the category of the unified process and the one that is most commonly implemented and extensively documented is the rational unified process known as RUP in the abbreviated form.

- The concept of the unified process is so very vast that it cannot be merely called as only a process! Rather it can be thought of as an extensible frame work which is customizable according to the needs of the software project or the specific organizations. 

- Concluding from this, the rational unified process can also be called a customizable frame work.  

- However, the name “unified process” is quite opposing to the rational unified process which generally marks the generic processes that include the elements that hold common for most of the refinements. 

- In addition, this name also avoids the potential issues of the trade mark infringement that arise since the unified process and the rational unified process are the trademarks of the IBM. 

- The unified process was first mentioned and described in detail in a book by Ivar Jacobson, James Rumbaugh and Grady Booch called “the unified software development process” in the year of 1999. 

Characteristics of Unified Process

This process is marked by some special characteristics that we have discussed below:

1. Iterative and incremental process: All the 4 phases of the unified process namely:

(a)    Inception

(b)   Elaboration

(c)   Construction and

(d)   Transition have been divided in to a frames or sets of time boxed iterations.

The inception phase is quite large and may be further divided into small iterations for large projects. Increments are the results of the iterations which in turn are responsible for improving the functionality of the software system or application as compared to what it had in the previous release. The emphasis and the effort of the iterations changes in due course during the development process though most of the process disciplines are focused like those mentioned below are focused on requirements, design, implementation and testing.

   2. Use case driven: The whole process is driven by the use cases whose work is to capture functional requirements and the definitions of the content of all the iterations.

    3. Architecture Centric: Architecture lies at the heart of the whole unified process and shapes the development of the whole system. Till now no such model has been developed that will cover all the aspects of the system and so multiple architectural models are implemented.

    4. Risk Focused: The unified process does not leave out any critical risks and they are discovered early in the development cycle.