What are benefits of agile process improvement?

Agile methodologies that we have today are a resultant of the experiences gained from the real life projects that were undertaken by the leading software professionals. These professionals were thorough with the challenges and limitations imposed by the traditional development methodologies on various projects. 

- The agile process improvement directly addresses the issues of the traditional development methods both in terms of processes and philosophy behind it. 

- Agile process improvement provides a simple framework to the development teams suiting varying scenarios while focusing up on the fast delivery of the business values. 

- With all these benefits of the agile process improvements, the organizations have been able to reduce the associated overall risk with the development of the project. 

- The delivery of the initial business values is accelerated well by the agile process improvement. 

- This is achieved through a process of constant planning and feedback. 

- Agile process improvement ensures that the business values are maximized throughout the development process. 

- With the API’s iterative planning plus feedback loop, it becomes possible for teams to align the software process with the business needs as required. 

- Another major benefit of the agile process is that the software development process can adapt to the ever–changing requirements of the process and business. 

- By taking a measure and evaluation of the status based up on the amount of work and testing done, visibility can be obtained to a more accurate value. 

- The final result of the agile process improvement is a software system that is capable of addressing the customer requirements and the business in a much better way. 

- By following an agile process improvement program, not only just deployable, tested and working software can be delivered on an incremental basis but also increased visibility, adaptability and values are delivered earlier in the software development life cycle. 

- This proves to be a great thing in reducing the risk associated with the project. 

- There are a number of problems with the traditional development methods. 

- In a research it was found that the waterfall style development methodology was the major factor in the contribution of failure of the software. 

- Some other software could not meet the real needs. 

- They had the inability in dealing with the changing requirements and late integration. 

- All this has proven that the traditional development methods prove to be risky as well as a costly way for building software. 

- Thus the majority of the industry has turned towards agile development.

- There is a continuous feedback input from the customers and a face to face communication among all the stake holders. 

- The business needs associated with the agile process improvement are ever changing. 

- Organizations want quick results from what they invest. 

- They want their improvement programs to keep pace with these changing business needs. 

- The agile process improvement is composed of several mechanisms using which all this can be achieved. 

- Working iteratively lets you deliver the product before the deadline to the customer. 

- It lets you deliver only the things are actually required i.e., it does not let you waste your time on the un-required things. 

- Also, early and regular feedback from the customer lets you deliver the product with quality as desired by the customer.

- Agile projects are distributive in nature i.e., the work is divided among people. 

- Agile software development is still an immature process and there is a need for improving it for the betterment of the software industry. 

- Agile process improvement is one way to do this.

What is meant by Rational Unified Process?

RUP or rational unified process - refinement of the unified process has been categorized among the most popular and commonly used iterative software development process frame works. The rational unified process has been a trade mark of the IBM Corporation since the year of 2003 when it was developed by the rational software corporation. 

The rational software corporation has long been recognized as a division of the IBM. 

What is a Rational Unified Process?

- Rational unified process as it sounds is an adaptable process frame work rather than being a single and concrete prescriptive process. 

- The rational unified process serves as a frame work that can be tailored according to the needs and objectives of the software development organizations and the project development teams who are responsible for the selection of the elements of the development process that fit their needs. 

- You can call the rational unified process as a specific implementation of the unified process since it is absolutely right. 

- Rational unified process is a kind of software process product which was acquired by the IBM from the rational software corporation. 

- The rational unified process forms a part of the IBM RMC (rational method composer) using which the whole development process can be customized. 

Based on the experience of the implementation of the RMC for various projects, the below mentioned 6 practices were declared as best practices for modern software engineering:

     1. Iterative development using risk as the primary iteration driver.

     2. Management of the requirements.

     3. Employment of an architecture based on components.

     4. Visual modelling of the software system or application.

     5. Continuous verification of the quality.

     6. Keeping the changes under the control.

Rational unified process contributes greatly in making improvements in the quality of the software system or application and in predicting the software development efforts.

Aspects of Rational Unified Process

The rational unified process is characterized by its following three aspects:

     1. It can be tailored according to the needs that will guide the development process.

     2. It is a tool that can be used for the automation of the whole development process.

     3. It is a service that serves for the accelerated adoption of all the processes and the tools involved.

Rational unified process was actually developed in the year of 1996. The year of 1997 saw the addition of the requirements and the test discipline to the rational unified process. In the year of 1998 again two new aspects were added to the process namely the business modelling and change. Apart from these, some techniques were also added that included:

     1. Performance testing

     2. UI design

     3. Data engineering

With all these techniques the rational unified process was updated to the UML 1.3. the rational unified process constitutes of some set of building blocks that describe the functionality which is to be produced. 

Below mentioned are the main building blocks:

     1. Roles

     2. Work products

     3.  Tasks

Nine disciplines governing the tasks have been defined:

     1. Deployment

     2. Implementation

     3. Requirements

     4. Business modelling

     5. Analysis and design

     6. Test

    In addition to these nine disciplines there are 3 additional disciplines:

    1. Environment

    2. Configuration management

    3. Project management

    

   Like the normal unified process, the rational unified process also consists of the 4 phases namely:

     1. Inception

     2. Elaboration

     3. Construction

     4. Transition

The RMC product has proved to be quite an effective tool for configuring, authoring, publishing and viewing processes with rational unified process incorporated in to it. The above mentioned 6 practices are now recognized as a paradigm in the field of software engineering for designing any software and increasing productivity. The development cycle is said to finish when the product release milestone is reached. 

Introduction to Frame Relay

Frame relay is a synchronous HDLC protocol based network. Frame Relay is a standardized wide area networking technology that specifies the physical and logical link layers of digital telecommunications channels using a packet switching methodology. Data is sent in HDLC packets, referred to as "frames".
Frame relay technology was developed to specifically address these needs :
- A higher performance packet technology.
- Simpler network management.
- More reliable networks.
- Lower network costs.
- Integration of traffic from both legacy and LAN applications over the same physical network.

Advantages of Frame Relay

Frame Relay offers an attractive alternative to both dedicated lines and X.25 networks for connecting LANs to bridges and routers. The success of the Frame Relay protocol is based on the following two underlying factors:
- Because virtual circuits consume bandwidth only when they transport data, many virtual circuits can exist simultaneously across a given transmission line. In addition, each device can use more of the bandwidth as necessary, and thus operate at higher speeds.
- The improved reliability of communication lines and increased error-handling sophistication at end stations allows the Frame Relay protocol to discard erroneous frames and thus eliminate time-consuming error-handling processing.

These two factors make Frame Relay a desirable choice for data transmission; however, they also necessitate testing to determine that the system works properly and that data is not lost.