Dear Dr. Process,

We'd like to avoid inventing our own process, but at the same time we need a process that's tailored to our specific needs. Somebody told us that we could use the Rational Unified Process as a starting point. Does this make sense, and if so, how can we customize the RUP to fit our particular requirements?

Ike N. Tailor, South Lake Tahoe, California

Dear Ike,

I agree, there's no process that fits everybody, and that's why you need to customize the RUP to fit your own particular needs. There are three primary ways to tailor the RUP:

1. Produce a custom RUP configuration using RUP Builder
2. Create your own development case and place it in a project-specific RUP Web site
3. Make comprehensive changes to the RUP with Process Workbench

A vast majority of projects should aim at using methods 1 and 2; more advanced customers may also want to use method 3. Let's have a brief look at each one.

Produce a custom RUP configuration using RUP Builder

With v2002 of the RUP, we introduced a component-based process architecture and included a new tool called RUP Builder. This tool allows you to select the areas of the process most applicable to your type of project by providing you with a choice of prebuilt process components called RUP Plug-Ins. Each Plug-In gives you best practices related to a certain technology, domain, or tool. You select the Plug-Ins that are applicable to your project and generate a custom RUP configuration providing best practices in the specified areas.

For example, if your project will develop large applications using the IBM WebSphere platform you can, in just a few minutes, generate a suitable process for this project by using RUP Builder to select the Plug-Ins for the IBM WebSphere Application Server and business modeling.

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Create your own development case and place it in a project-specific RUP Web site

A development case is a brief description of how you should apply the RUP, what artifacts to produce when and with what formality, how to map roles to people in your project, and so on. You typically produce a development case for a project or a type of project. The development case should be very short, ideally only a couple of pages long. Rather than duplicating information in the RUP, you can link to activities, artifacts, and roles in the RUP from the development case.

We recommend that you place your development case and other project-specific guidance such as your own programming guidelines, example artifacts, templates, and other reference material in a project-specific RUP Web site. By using the RUP Project Web Site Template, you can rapidly make this guidance available to your team members as an integral part of the RUP user experience, without having to redo all your customizations each time you install a new version of the RUP or generate a new RUP configuration using RUP Builder. The project-specific Web site provides a thin layer of guidance on top of your RUP configuration.

You can find more information on how to build your project Web site using the template in the RUP Process Engineering Toolkit.

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Make comprehensive changes to the RUP with Process Workbench

While the vast majority of adopting organizations will find that customizing with methods 1 and 2 is enough, some organizations will need to make more extensive changes to the RUP. These organizations will typically need to add, remove, or radically change several activities, artifacts, or roles, potentially packaged in the form of RUP Plug-Ins. For these organizations we provide a powerful process-authoring tool called Process Workbench, available only as a component of Rational Suite Enterprise.

Process Workbench is a Rose add-in targeting professional process engineers. It allows you to visualize your changes to the process and launch an HTML editor of your choice for doing process authoring. Using Process Workbench, you can either package your changes into a RUP Plug-In -- which enables any person with access to your Plug-In to take advantage of your customization -- or directly generate a RUP configuration.

Ike, as you can see, the RUP is designed to be customized, and we provide you with a variety of tools to help you in this task.

Snip away!
Dr. Process

Editor's Note:This article was first published on the Rational Developer Network March, 2002.

About the author

Per Kroll is the director of the Rational Unified Process development and product management teams at IBM Rational Software. He's been working with customers as a trainer, mentor, and consultant on the RUP and its predecessors since 1992 and was the original product manager for the RUP when the product team was launched in 1996. He's also been heavily involved in certifying partners and training Rational personnel to deliver services around the RUP.

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Table of contents

• Produce a custom RUP configuration using RUP Builder
• Create your own development case and place it in a project-specific RUP Web site
• Make comprehensive changes to the RUP with Process Workbench
• About the author
• Comments

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