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Dinosaur meets Archaeopteryx? or: Is there an alternative for Rational’s Unified Process?

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Abstract

Since 1999, Rational’s Unified Process (RUP) is being offered as a guideline for software projects using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). RUP has been advertised to be iterative, and incremental, use case-driven and architecture-centric. These claims are discussed while RUP core concepts like phase, iteration, discipline (formerly: workflow) and milestone are reviewed in more detail. It turns out that the RUP constitutes a considerable step towards a broad dissemination of software process modelling ideas but some of the RUP definitions and structures lack clear structure and are too complex and overloaded for practical use.

Among others, I see the following particular problems: (1) phases do still dominate the process and iteration structure, (2) the term “software architecture” is not clearly defined and its role is still underestimated, (3) RUP “disciplines” are a partly redundant concept complicating the process more than supporting it, (4) powerful and transparent structuring principles like recursion and orthogonality do not get the attention they deserve. As an alternative, our model for Evolutionary, Object-oriented Software development (EOS) is contrasted with the RUP.

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  1. FB Mathematik und Informatik, Universität Marburg, Hans Meerwein-Str., 35032, Marburg, Germany

    Wolfgang Hesse

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  1. Wolfgang Hesse
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Correspondence to Wolfgang Hesse.

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Hesse, W. Dinosaur meets Archaeopteryx? or: Is there an alternative for Rational’s Unified Process?. Softw Syst Model 2, 240–247 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-003-0033-y

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