The Rational Unified Process - An enabler for higher process maturity

Philippe Kruchten (pbk@ece.ubc.ca), Staff, University of British Columbia

Philippe Kruchten is former director and general manager of the IBM Rational Software Process Business Unit, in charge of the Rational Unified Process (RUP). He worked with Rational for thirteen years, in various functions and places: France, Sweden, the US, and Vancouver, Canada. Philippe's main interests right now, besides software architecture and design, are software engineering and the development process. He is campaigning, in Canada, for the concept of state-licensed professional software engineers.

Annie Kuntzmann-CombellesQ-Labs

Annie Kuntzmann-Combelles is an article contributor.

Summary: This paper highlights the key concepts that a mature organization (a Level 3 development unit) has to demonstrate and how the Rational Unified Process components match these requirements. This is a must read if you are looking to explore software engineering processes, in particular RUP, to successfully fulfill CMM requirements.

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Date: 21 Nov 2003
Level: Introductory
Activity: 318 views

Today, companies must continually search for ways to achieve a higher degree of performance. The challenge of the future is to compete at a global level. These common symptoms become even more obvious when bidding on the worldwide market:

Need for performance: too many bugs are observed at the validation phase and an unstable version of the product is put on the market to meet the delivery target
Need for efficiency: projects overcome budget and planning
Loss of market share: competitors perform better and deliver better quality
Lack of competent resources: the turnover is high and/or hiring new engineers is extremely difficult
Need to integrate evolving technologies with minimal risks: technologies supporting products have to follow the trends; teams are not always experienced enough to meet the challenge

More generally, we can say there is a strong need to optimize all facets of the developed product.

Therefore, making the widely accepted assumption that the process to develop the product impacts heavily upon the results, one of the most common scenarios would be to address the software process to improve products.

Read this whitepaper in its entirety by clicking here. (PDF format)

About the authors

Annie Kuntzmann-Combelles is an article contributor.

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