Construction

Inception handled the risk of building a project that had little or no value.
Elaboration handled the risk of building a project whose architecture could not support the high risk requirements.

Construction handles the risk of providing the most amount of value possible given the time constraints on the project.

By the time we get to Construction, we are sure that the project has value, and we are sure that the architecture is valid and will support the solution. Now we must build as much of the feature set as we can to provide the most value to our customers.

So there is an interesting point to understand here for a RUP project. Most people will say that value to the customer should drive development. In a RUP project this is true during Construction, but in Elaboration technical risk drives the project. In other words, during Elaboration, the Architect picks what we work on based on highest risk first, NOT based on highest value! But then during Construction the RUP Systems Analyst (a.k.a. Business Analyst, Requirements Owner, etc) picks what we work on based on highest value first.

Another interesting point is that other than how we pick what requirements we are going to implement, the tasks on the iteration plans for iterations in Elaboration and Construction are nearly identical! There are some architectural tasks that we can skip in Construction, but overall the work is quite similar. The main difference is that the work in Construction is less risky as we’ve already created an architecture to follow and proved that it will work.

By the end of Construction, the product is complete, or as complete as we could make it, and provides the most amount of value possible.