Part 1: RUP Basics

One thing that often confuses people is that RUP is both a process and a product. I’d like to start by clarifying the difference between them.

When people first start looking at the products and services of IBM’s Rational brand, it seems overwhelming. But the RUP is the thing that ties it all together. All of the products, consulting services, instructor led and web based training that they offer are there to support the RUP’s six best practices. So basically if you understand the six best practices, you understand if Rational has a solution that could help you.

The six best practices are:
* Develop Iteratively
* Manage Requirements
* Use Component Architectures
* Model Visually
* Continuously Verify Quality
* Manage Change

So every product, service and training class in the Rational brand are there to help you succeed in these six areas, and the RUP process describes the approach to take to achieve this improvement.

The RUP product, on the other hand, helps to deliver the RUP process into the hands of the team. Basically the tool consists of four major parts.
* Process Delivery Tools
- Workflow
- Roles and Responsibilities
- Templates
- Examples
- Tool Mentors
- Guidelines
- Checklists
- Etc.
* Process Configuration Tools
* Process Authoring Tools
* Community Tools

The “Delivery Tools” get the RUP process into your hands by defining the workflow for nine different disciplines, such as requirements management, the roles and their responsibilities, templates for their artifacts, etc.

The “Configuration Tools” let you customize your version of RUP with your own process assets or with various RUP “plug ins” that center around other process or technologies, for example there are plug-ins for “XP,” “User Experience Development,” “COTS selection,” “J2EE development,” etc.

“Authoring Tools” allow you to create your own processes in the same style as the RUP and to create plug-ins like those listed above.

“Community Tools” are about the forums that exist (and even this blog!) to help you adopt the RUP successfully.

In this blog, I assume that you have access to the RUP tool. Even if you don’t I think you will derive huge value from the posts I put here, but to really maximize your chances of success, having a license of RUP will greatly help. And happily, it is the least expensive Rational tool by orders of magnitude.