OOSE: Unified Process

Today I learned about the Unified Process (UP) strategy in order to design our software using Object Oriented Principles:


What is UP?

UP is developed by at Rational Software (IBM). It is highly iterative and incremental process... i.e. the software is not released in one big bang at the end of the project; instead, it is developed and released in pieces (prototypes, partial releases, beta, etc.)

This method is lightweight compared to the waterfall model in software engineering with respect to commitment to phases and documentation. The water fall model require heavy documentation of each phase before proceeding... UP is an example of Agile methods.

Life Cycle of UP
- Inception: "Daydreaming"
- Elaboration: "Design/Details"
- Construction: "Do it"
- Transition: "Deploy it"

During inception, we try to create a vision and scope document at a high level of abstraction.

In elaboration, we collect more detailed requirements and do high-level analysis and design. i.e. check for risks, such as technological risks (do we have the technology to do the job?), skill risks (do we have the skills?)... In this phase, we develop the use cases!

During the construction, we build production-quality software in many increments, tested and integrated each satisfying a subset of the requirements of the project.

Finally, during the transition phase, the activities include beta testing, performance tuning (optimization) and user training.

UP Artifacts

What are the products of the UP? The UP describes work activities, which result in "work products" called "artifacts"... for example:
- vision, scope and business case descriptions
- use cases
- UML diagrams
- Source Code
- Web graphics
- database schema

The Process Workflows

- Requirement analysis
- Design: architecture and class levels
- Implementation
- Testing
- Management