Customer Reviews

Adopting the Rational Unified Process: Success with the RUP

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Target Audience
IT professionals who are looking for instructions on how to implement the Rational Unified Process (RUP) in their project or organization.

Contents
This book is an instructional approach on how to implement RUP in an organization.

The book is divided into the following chapters: How To Adopt RUP In Your Organization; The First Meeting With RUP; What Is A RUP Project?; Assessing Your Organization; Motivating The RUP Adoption; Planning The RUP Adoption; Obtaining Support From The Organization; How To Adopt RUP In Your Project; Deciding Upon Your Process; Documenting Your Process; A Guide To Successful Mentoring; Experiences From Actual Implementations; Adding Another Project Management Method To RUP; Glossary; Recommended Reading; Index

Review
The Rational Unified Process, or RUP, is a software engineering methodology that attempts to map out and document all parts of a software development project. It's extremely comprehensive, but it's also adaptable to whatever level of effort is appropriate for your situation. This book, Adopting The Rational Unified Process, will not teach you RUP, but it will help guide you during the implementation process.

The authors have had extensive implementation experience with RUP, and they share their methodology of what works and what doesn't when it comes time to consider a RUP implementation for your organization. While RUP can be overwhelming to look at and imagine within your company, Bergstrom and Raberg help you understand each step of what is needed during an implementation. Plenty of time is spent assessing your organization and processes so that you can get a good fit and determination of what RUP pieces make sense given your particular situation.

In my view, this book is probably best used by a project manager or team leader who is responsible for implementing a RUP project. If you are reading this material in conjunction with an actual real-life implementation, you'll get the most out of the information.

Conclusion
If you've had instruction in RUP and now need to take the next steps for implementation, this would be a good choice to assist you in that process.

This book is perfect for the new process engineer who is faced with the job of implementing RUP for their organization. Provides a great roadmap for following but not enough to do it alone - you will need a good mentor with experience doing this. This is one to add to the growing list of books you should read to be successful at RUP adoptions.

Introducing or enhancing the methodologies and processes for managing software development projects, introduces a certain amount of Change in the organization. Change is inevitable, yet Change is always faced with some level of resistance.

Depending on your corporate culture and environment, this book can help create a strategy road-map for successfully introducing the RUP process across the project or a larger team. While the book focuses on the RUP methodology, principles can easily be applied for PMBOK or other Project Management processes. It is a good book for planning, executing and managing the Change caused by adopting new software development processes, tools, techniques and templates.

From my experience, the adoption stages are: Awareness, Understanding, Buy-in and lastly, Engagement.

This book is a very well structured and easy to read book that explains step by step how to be successful in adopting the Rational Unified Process. If you are a company that wishes to consider the RUP you should buy and read this book preferably before you start because it will give you excellent advice to follow before it is too late and prevent mistakes and back tracking.

"Adopting the Rational Unified Process: Success with the RUP" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0321202945/qid=1073105259/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-1339915-1067139?v=glance&s=books) is a title any organization looking to streamline operations would be wise to pick up. It's basically a "how-to" guide on making RUP work for you. And right off the bat, it lets you know that RUP is meant to be picked apart.

It explains strategies in getting the members of your team to buy into RUP's concepts, as well as getting management to support it. It also maps out a proposed strategy for using RUP not only in new projects, but for inserting it into work already ongoing.

It's written with a very friendly tone, and explained in plain English, with short, to the point chapters, making it a very easy read. It's also organized very logically, and features many of the RUP templates, as well as UML diagrams and schematics that reinforce the lessons learned. The book also does a good job of demonstrating the concepts mentioned, by giving examples of how RUP is used, and then follows it up with an outstanding appendix highlighting many well-known businesses using RUP in their operations.

Because of the clarity of writing, proven examples, and exhibits, this book would make an outstanding addition to the curriculum for either a software engineering course or business class.