Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Do You REALLY Understand the RUP Phases?

Hundreds of my clients claim that they already understand the RUP. I always push on this because I find that most people who say they understand the RUP really don’t.

I have devised a fascinating quiz to help prove this point. It is fascinating because I have given it to literally over a thousand people and almost all have failed to get the questions correct! Yet I have also given it to IBM Rational Technical Specialists, and 100% of them have gotten 100% of the questions correct!

This tells me that the RUP is not great at communicating itself. I would love to be put in charge of fixing this problem, but in the meantime, this issue ensures that I will have lots and lots of work available to me helping folks to understand and adopt it. It is possible that no one could make it self adopting without consulting, but I’d like to imagine it could be done.

Ok so on to the quiz. The quiz consists of five questions. The first four questions are yes/no questions and the fifth (a newer addition to the quiz) is a pick choice A or B. These questions are NOT meant to be trick questions. The answers are obvious to those who know the RUP and a mystery to those that don’t.

When I give the quiz to Rational employees, the results are always interesting. If the colleague is new to the company, they hem and haw for a while but eventually, with lots of caveats, give me all the answers correctly. They are afraid to be the first internal person to get one wrong. But they don’t.

Meanwhile when I give it to a veteran colleague, they answer quickly and with an almost defiant air. Then they say, “and if you disagree, it is you that are incorrect in your interpretation of the RUP, Anthony.” Yet they give the same answers. The real difference is that they are confident in their understanding of the RUP!

OK, so here are the questions. Good luck! Oh and remember they are not trick questions. It is not “wordplay.” For example, when I say “typical” below, what I mean is that if you looked at 100 projects, most would have some characteristic.

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