The Unified Process Inception Phase: Best Practices in Implementing the UP

This book presents some very interesting articles. Sure, they sometimes go beyond the original scope of the RUP but that's exactly why you need to read these books. We're implementing the RUP in my company and these books helped us to fill in the missing techniques. The new workflows, Infrastructure Management and Operations & Support, are right on the money. We've benefitted immensely from the concept of Infrastructure Management because it describes how to attain higher levels of reuse within our department, how to develop a shared architecture and enterprise requirements model that all projects can benefit from, and how to manage resources across multiple projects. The RUP only focuses on the development of a single project, which is okay, but it isn't what my company needed. Without Infrastructure Management the RUP is virtually useless to us. Too bad Ambler and Constantine don't work for Rational, because if they did the RUP might actually be usable.

Once again Scott Ambler has managed to bring together a well organized, detailed, view of a very complex topic. The Inception phase, has become a well worn reference book on my desk ( right nexdt to Scott's other Unified Process Books ).I highly recommend this to anyone looking for insight into proven approached to problem solving. I'm looking forward to the next book in the series.

This is a really great book. It goes into detail about an improved version of the lifecycle for the Unified Process, clearly the authors put some significant thought into it. What I really like is that this book collects some great articles from Software Development magazine that cover topics that the RUP barely covers if it touches them at all. For example there's an article on CRC modeling, a low tech way to model the classes within your problem space, which really does support one of the book's claims that the RUP's "use case driven" philosophy is questionable at best. They also make a valid point that you can test during the Inception Phase and go on to present several really excellent articles to that point. Ambler's Full Lifecycle Object-Oriented Testing (FLOOT) methodology is summarized in the testing chapter as well, a topic that they go into further detail in their other books. Karl Wiegers' article on customer rights and responsibilities really made sense to me, I'm into XP, so I went out and bought Wieger's book called Software Requirements as a result. Jim Highsmith and Lynne Nix's article on feasibility studies was also really good, along with all the others in this book. It's amazing how this book collects some of the best material written by the best minds in the computer industry.Personally, I can't imagine anyone adopting the RUP without first reading this book series. I think it's great that someone has gone to the effort to sort through the best articles written by some of the best minds in this industry. Kudos to Ambler and Constantine for having the courage to stand up and say what many others have been afraid to.

This book is a collection of articles originally published in Software Development magazine, the purpose of which is to fill in some of the holes left in the Inception Phase of the Unified Process. For developers I show how the models of the Unified Modeling Language *UML) fit together, Luke Hohmann describes how to apply patterns effectively, Nancy Wilkinson shows how to use Class Responsibility Collaborator (CRC) cards (from eXtreme Programming(XP)), Ellen Gottesdiener describes how to capture business rules, several people write about developing international software, and several others write about testing techniques applicable to the early parts of the project life cycle. For project managers Karl Wiegers describes risk management, Dave Thomas shares his experiences with web-time software development, Steve McConnell shows how to manage outsourced projects, Neil Whitten describes how to find a good vendor (to outsource to), Warren Keuffel and Karl Wiegers provide significant insight into metrics, and Larry Constantine describes how to manage large projects. There is also significant advice for selecting tools presented by several authors, just in case you wanted to do business with more than one tool vendor (if you get my drift).In short, the book presents a collection of best practices applicable to the Inception Phase. Best practices that come from multiple sources, respected members of the software development community, and not just from a single tool vendor. All of these articles were picked because they describe either topics not covered by the current version of the RUP, are covered minimally by the RUP, or provide an alternate view for how to go about it. Furthermore, these best practices are presented within the scope of an enhanced lifecycle for the Unified Process, one that could arguably be called the Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) because it includes a Production phase, an operations & support workflow, and an infrastructure management workflow (for cross-project issues such as reuse, risk management, training and education, ...). Most enterprises have more than one project in development, in fact they often have many in development and many more in project which they need to operate and support. Therefore we need a version of the Unified Process that reflects that reality, and this book series does just that.