The Enterprise Unified Process: Extending the Rational Unified Process

The Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) unites diverse disciplines, including development, enterprise architecture, operations, production and portfolio management, reuse and business process modeling, under an easy to follow framework. It was refreshing to find a book that recognizes the need to accommodate the installed base of existing software as part of the planning, development and deployment process. This is an excellent guide for any manager who wants to ensure that essential IT disciplines are addressed. The focus of EUP is to enhance the commonly accepted Rational Unified Process (RUP). The authors have added new disciplines to RUP that include business modeling, portfolio management, enterprise administration, reuse, enterprise architecture and process improvement. The introduction of business modeling into the overall process is essential to weave IT processes and disciplines into the most essential driver of any systems initiative - the business. The enterprise architecture discussion was also refreshing given that many organizations have forgone this discipline and have created redundant, stovepipe applications and data structures that significantly stifle business agility. The "Reuse" chapter raises the rarely deployed reuse strategy. It is critically important to not replicate business processes, models, systems, data structures, source code and interfaces. The costs and risks of trying to keep parallel assets synchronized have been written about extensively. This book promotes the idea that reuse is just another aspect of the enterprise unified process. It is also one of the few discussions about reuse that recognizes the value of harvesting existing assets. Also of note is the portfolio management discussion that focuses attention on the need to incorporate project management with application management. It should be noted, however, that portfolio management has much less focus on applications than the traditional industry definition as promoted by Gartner, Inc. Finally, this book makes great use of tips, tool references and citations to books or papers that readers can use to expand on their understanding of a given topic. The last chapter of the book takes a realistic and honest look at deploying the enterprise unified process, including its possible retirement.

This book is must readying for any organization using -- or attempting to use -- the RUP. The EUP's additional disciplines completes the RUP in a necessary and sufficient manner. The book is written in a straight-forward manner, is easy to read and is well-organized. Each chapter reminds you to be practical (the antipatterns), explains how the additional discipline relates to the others and provides software tools and suggested reading. Don't RUPture your software development efforts without having the more comprehensive approach of the EUP!

The book provides a very readable coverage of IBM's Rational Unified Process, as well as useful extensions that address important aspects of enterprise systems planning, development, and management. The systematic and disciplined treatment is greatly enhanced by the inclusion of much useful, pragmatic advice that draws from the practical experience of the authors in building real systems. I quite liked this book. Although it doesn't give enough emphasis to conceptual data analysis (something RUP has always been weak on), it has loads of useful, practical content that make it a worthwhile addition to the literature.

In the interests of disclosure, I must share that I was one of the technical reviewers for this fascinating book. But my recommendations of it are based upon its sensible content. Here is my take on how the Enterprise Unified Process can improve your organization. Enterprise thinking is not about thinking "bigger", it's about thinking differently. The Enterprise Unified Process is a qualitative leap forward that will change the scope of your project from simply a development lifecycle to a SYSTEM lifecycle. The authors aptly recommend that if you are not yet using an iterative process, then you should first adopt the Rational UP, Scrum, FDD or other project-focused development process. But if your needs go beyond merely managing or executing development projects, you will need to move to the EUP. Structurally, the EUP builds on the RUP, and augments RUP to address the needs of an enterprise rather than just software development. Structurally, the EUP adds two new phases to RUP: the Production phase and the Retirement Phase. The Production phase begins after RUP's Transition phase, and this is where each release of software spends its entire life after it is developed. The activities of the Production phase focus on keeping your software and systems running, backed-up, and that defect reports are being addressed. The Retirement phase defines the activities involved in removing software, or a system, from production. Retirement is a complex process that can be accomplished all-at-once, or incrementally over time, but retirement always requires coordination with other processes in your organization. EUP adds a new support Discipline to RUP: the Operations and Support Discipline. This discipline includes disaster planning and recovery, service-level agreements between operations and support teams, and addressing end-user questions and problem reports for systems in production. But EUP goes far beyond vanilla RUP with the addition of "Enterprise Management Disciplines" that are specific and unique to the enterprise context. Here, EUP introduces the disciplines and associated roles and activities for: * Enterprise Business Modeling * Portfolio Managment * Enterprise Architecture * Strategic Reuse * People Management * Enterprise Administration * Software Process Improvement Each discipline is explained clearly with discussion of the workflows that are executed, sample case studies, tools that can assist you in the discipline, and--my favorite--"anti-patterns" for each discipline. For me the anti-patterns helped me to better understand each discipline's goals. If you are familiar with RUP, you should have a feeling now for how much RUP does not address for the enterprise, and how much the EUP has to offer. But how can an organization move to EUP? Luckily, the authors conclude the book with sound recommendations on adopting the EUP. If you are involved with, or responsible for, software development to support your company's business goals, this b

I am so impressed with this book! It does a great job at filling in many of the gaps in RUP. The Life of a software system is so much more than just the development cycle. Unfortunately, so much "process" stuff these days focuses on developing the software without regard to some very important facts. For instance, IF the development and installation processes are successful (and we hope they will be) then someone will need to maintain the system. EUP thoughtfully guides us through supporting that system while in production and then eventually retiring such a system.