- What Is the Rational Unified Process?
- The Rational Unified Process as a Product
- Software Best Practices
- Other Key Features
- A Brief History of the Rational Unified Process
- Summary
The Rational Unified Process has matured over the years and reflects the collective experience of the many people and companies that today make up the rich heritage of IBM's Rational Software division. Let us take a quick look at the rich ancestry of RUP 2003, as illustrated in Figure 2-3.
Figure 2-3. Genealogy of the Rational Unified Process
Going backward in time, the Rational Unified Process was brought into the IBM offering by the acquisition of the 20-year-old Rational Software Corporation by IBM Software Group in February 2003. The Rational Unified Process incorporates material in the areas of data engineering, business modeling, project management, and configuration management, the latter as a result of a merger with Pure-Atria in 1997. It includes elements of the Real-Time Object-Oriented Method, developed by the founders of ObjecTime, acquired by Rational in 2000. It also brings a tighter integration to the Rational Software suite of tools.
The Rational Unified Process is the direct successor to the Rational Objectory Process (ROP), version 4, which was the result of the integration of the Rational Approach and the Objectory Process (version 3.8) after the merger of Rational Software Corporation and Objectory AB in 1995. From its Objectory ancestry, the process has inherited its process model (described in Chapter 3) and the central concept of use case (described in Chapter 6). From its Rational background, it gained the current formulation of iterative development (described in Chapters 4 and 11) and architecture (described in Chapter 5). This ROP version 4 also incorporated material on requirements management from Requisite, Inc., and a detailed test process inherited from SQA, Inc., companies that also were acquired by Rational Software. Finally, this version of the process was the first to use the newly created Unified Modeling Language (UML 0.8).
The Objectory Process was created in Sweden in 1987 by Ivar Jacobson.4