Agility and Discipline Made Easy: Practices from OpenUP and RUP [Paperback]

Per Kroll (Author), Bruce MacIsaac (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321321308 | ISBN-13: 978-0321321305 | Publication Date: May 29, 2006 | Edition: 1

"The Japanese samurai Musashi wrote: 'One can win with the long sword, and one can win with the short sword. Whatever the weapon, there is a time and situation in which it is appropriate.'

"Similarly, we have the long RUP and the short RUP, and all sizes in between. RUP is not a rigid, static recipe, and it evolves with the field and the practitioners, as demonstrated in this new book full of wisdom to illustrate further the liveliness of a process adopted by so many organizations around the world. Bravo!"

--Philippe Kruchten, Professor, University of British Columbia

"The Unified Process and its practices have had, and continue to have, a great impact on the software industry. This book is a refreshing new look at some of the principles underlying the Unified Process. It is full of practical guidance for people who want to start, or increase, their adoption of proven practices. No matter where you are today in terms of software maturity, you can start improving tomorrow."

--Ivar Jacobson, Ivar Jacobson Consulting

"Kroll and MacIsaac have written a must-have book. It is well organized with new principles for software development. I encounter many books I consider valuable; I consider this one indispensable, especially as it includes over 20 concrete best practices. If you are interested in making your software development shop a better one, read this book!"

--Ricardo R. Garcia, President, Global Rational User Group Council, www.rational-ug.org/index.php

"Agile software development is real, it works, and it's here to stay. Now is the time to come up to speed on agile best practices for the Unified Process, and this book provides a great starting point."

--Scott W. Ambler, practice leader, Agile Modeling

"IBM and the global economy have become increasingly dependent on software over the last decade, and our industry has evolved some discriminating best practices. Per and Bruce have captured the principles and practices of success in this concise book; a must for executives, project managers, and practitioners. These ideas are progressive, but they strike the right balance between agility and governance and will form the foundation for successful systems and software developers for a long time."

--Walker Royce, Vice President, IBM Software Services-Rational

"Finally, the RUP is presented in digestible, byte-size pieces. Kroll and MacIsaac effectively describe a set of practices that can be adopted in a low-ceremony, ad hoc fashion, suited to the culture of the more agile project team, while allowing them to understand how to scale their process as needed."

--Dean Leffingwell, author and software business advisor and executive

"This text fills an important gap in the knowledge-base of our industry: providing agile practices in the proven, scalable framework of the Unified Process. With each practice able to be throttled to the unique context of a development organization, Kroll and MacIsaac provide software teams with the ability to balance agility and discipline as appropriate for their specific needs."

--Brian G. Lyons, CTO, Number Six Software, Inc.

In Agility and Discipline Made Easy, Rational Unified Process (RUP) and Open Unified Process (OpenUP) experts Per Kroll and Bruce MacIsaac share twenty well-defined best practices that you and your team can start adopting today to improve the agility, predictability, speed, and cost of software development.

Kroll and MacIsaac outline proven principles for software development, and supply a number of supporting practices for each. You'll learn what problems each practice addresses and how you can best leverage RUP and OpenUP (an open-source version of the Unified Process) to make the practice work for you. You'll find proactive, prescriptive guidance on how to adopt the practices with minimal risk and implement as much or as little of RUP or OpenUP as you want.

Learn how to apply sample practices from the Unified Process so you can

• Execute your project in iterations
• Embrace and manage change
• Test your own code
• Describe requirements from the user perspective
• Architect with components and services
• Model key perspectives

Whether you are interested in agile or disciplined development using RUP, OpenUP, or other agile processes, this book will help you reduce the anxiety and cost associated with software improvement by providing an easy, non-intrusive path toward improved results--without overwhelming you and your team.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Per Kroll manages the development of RUP and is responsible for IBM Rational process strategy. He launched and is the project lead for the open source process initiative Eclipse Process Framework (EPF). In addition to his highly acclaimed books, Per has written for a variety of trade magazines.

Bruce MacIsaac is technical lead for the RUP content development team at IBM and oversees IBM's contributions to OpenUP. He has many years of experience as a software developer, technical lead, and manager of small to large software teams.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The goal of this book is to describe a set of well-defined practices that you and your team can start adopting today. You can choose to adopt only one practice or adopt all of them over a period of time. The practices in this book have been shown to improve the quality, predictability, speed, and/or cost of software development.

Why We Wrote This Book

During more than a decade of assisting companies in improving their software development practices and leading the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP), we have had the opportunity to see what works and what doesn't. We have seen the rewards of successful adoption of RUP, and we have seen the challenges that projects and team members may encounter along the way. Over the last few years, we have also learned a lot from the agile movement, with its increased focus on people and low-ceremony approaches to software development. More recently, we have also been key drivers of an open source project, the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF), which includes the Open Unified Process (OpenUP)--an open-source version of the Unified Process. One of the objectives of EPF is to create a repository of industry practices, which are customizable and can be assembled into a set of out-of-the-box processes reflecting different development styles. Through all of this work, we have gained valuable experiences in what works and what doesn't, as well as how to package that knowledge into pragmatic practices that can be easily adopted.

We have found that many companies view improving their software development capabilities as a staggering task. It seems to be like eating an elephant: where do you start, and how do you go about it? The answer? You pick a tender spot and take one bite at a time. The "tender spot" is where you have the most pain; the "one bite at a time" is one or two practices, one or two software disciplines, and/or one or two tools. In other words, take "good bites." You don't want to choke on them. You want to be just a little bit hungry for the next bite.

This book describes a number of "good bites" that will allow you to start improving your software development capabilities today. You can take one bite or a larger number of bites, all based on your appetite.

We want to reduce the initial anxiety and cost associated with taking on a software improvement effort by providing an easy and unintrusive path toward improved results, without overwhelming you and your team. At the same time we want to show early results that keep the momentum going, thus maintaining the interest and commitment of everyone involved.

The practices in this book are written independently of any one specific process. Taken together, however, they do cover many key aspects of RUP and OpenUP. We believe that this book will be an asset for projects and companies interested in adopting some or all of RUP or OpenUP. Each of the practices described in this book distills knowledge from RUP, OpenUP, and other sources to provide pragmatic guidance on how to solve a particular software development problem. They help you in your software improvement effort by attacking one problem at a time. Each practice describes how OpenUP and RUP can help you adopt the practice and also references other methods such as eXtreme Programming (XP)¹ and Scrum,² so that you can understand differences and similarities in relation to other methods. This book can also be valuable for projects and companies with no interest in RUP or OpenUP. You can simply take any number of the practices in this book and adopt them on their own.

What Will You Learn from This Book?

This book will familiarize you with the following:

• A number of key principles for software development, which have been validated by thousands of successful software projects of different sizes in a variety of industries.
• A number of concrete practices that you and your team can adopt today that support the key principles. Each of the practices described provides information on the following categories:

- The problem the practice addresses

- How you practically go about adopting the practice

- Related practices

- Where to read more about the practice

- How to incrementally adopt practices with minimal risk, and how to leverage RUP and OpenUP

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is aimed specifically at the following readers:

• All members of a software development team who would like to learn some practices that can be applied today.
• Team members who would like to learn RUP or OpenUP, one practice at a time. This book does not give you an understanding of the complete RUP or OpenUP, but if you have understood the practices described in this book, you have come a long way in learning about RUP and OpenUP.
• Managers, process engineers, and others who want to understand how key practices can be adopted in their organization, one practice at a time.

Structure and Content of This Book

The book is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1 provides an overview of six key principles for software development that are used as a base for the structure of this book. Chapter 1 also provides an overview of RUP, OpenUP, XP, and Scrum.

Chapters 2 through 7 review each of the six key principles in turn. For each principle, we describe a number of practices that support it. Most practices can be adopted individually, allowing you to understand how to make quick improvements in your development without having to implement too much change. Chapter 8 describes how to adopt and benefit from these practices.

How to Read This Book

This book can be read using any of three approaches:

1. Read only the parts that make sense for your team. Start by reading Chapter 1. Determine which key principle you think would add the most value to you and your team. Go to the corresponding chapter. Look through the practices listed for that chapter, and read those you find of most interest. Does the problem addressed by each practice coincide with a problem you are facing, and is it worth fixing? If so, share those with your team members and get agreement to adopt the ones that pertain to your situation.

Once you have adopted the identified practices, use the same approach to identify the next set of practices to read up on. This approach is described in more detail in Chapter 8.

2. Read the parts that are relevant for your role. Note that since software development is a team effort, it is good to be at least somewhat familiar with practices for other roles. The list below identifies the chapters and practices that probably are the most applicable for each of the roles on a software team.

• Project Manager: read Chapters 1 and 8 and Practices 1-4, 7- 10, 12-13, and 19-20.
• Architect: read Chapter 1 and Practices 1, 2, 10-11, 15-18, and 20.
• Analyst: read Chapter 1 and Practices 1-2, 7-10, 12, and 20.
• Developer: read Chapter 1 and Practices 1-2, 5-9, 11-12, 14-18, and 20.
• Tester: read Chapter 1 and Practices 1-2, 4-9, 12, and 20.

3. Read the book from start to finish to learn as much as possible about practices applicable for all members on your team.

For More Information

To learn more about or to download EPF and OpenUP, go to the Eclipse Foundation Web site at www.eclipse.org/epf/.

RUP is delivered through the product IBM Rational Method Composer (RMC). Additional information about RUP or RMC, including a data sheet and a product demo, can be obtained from IBM at http:// www.ibm.com/software/awdtools/rmc/.

Information about the Rational Software Global User Group Community can be found at http://www.rational-ug.org/index.php.

Academic institutions can contact IBM for information on a special program for including RUP in a software engineering curriculum at http://www.ibm.com/university/.

1 See Beck 2004.
2 See Schwaber 2002.

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (May 29, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321321308
• ISBN-13: 978-0321321305
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #320,909 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended reading, June 6, 2006

By 

Lynn Sheen (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Agility and Discipline Made Easy: Practices from OpenUP and RUP (Paperback)

Must reading for anyone responsible for successfully delivering development projects of any size.

Based on six key development principles, this book provides 20 proven concrete practices, derived from thousands of engagements. Flexibility is a key concept of the book. You can choose one or all of the practices to adopt for your organization. Picking those practices which best fit into your current process and most needed by you, makes it easy to begin realizing benefits today.

The advice given for each practice is practical, concise and reflects the authors' obvious depth of experience in the trenches. Three different levels of adoption are provided for each practice, enabling you to bite off just enough, but not too much, to swallow. The book emphasizes effectiveness, clearly describing why the practice is effective and tying the practice back to its core principle.

This book incorporates useful ideas from all the popular processes and successfully blends them together into what is described as the Unified Process. Basically, this book makes process improvements accessible to everyone. It enables you to make incremental changes, in an iterative manner, to effectively manage the transition to a better development process for your particular organization.

The software development industry has been waiting for a process which ties together the collective process knowledge acquired by the industry throughout the years. This book is a fundamental reflection of the process community which is currently evolving. Buy it, read it and become a part of the growing community around software development processes. You are likely to find it a very enjoyable and rewarding experience.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Understanding RUP as Agile, January 18, 2007

By 

Erik Sargent (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Agility and Discipline Made Easy: Practices from OpenUP and RUP (Paperback)

If you consider yourself an agile developer, but you keep getting heat from management about more discipline, this is a great book to get some perspective with. Taking individual practices from RUP and applying them "just enough" in key places can build trust and improve communication inside development and with external customers and other political stakeholders.

The authors do a great job too of explaining the range of formality available to a team and what the factors are that should push you towards greater formality - such as distributed teams, lack of trust, stakeholders external to the team, etc.

And if you are tied to more formal methods, the book can help you understand when it might be safe to try a little less formality.

There is no agile bashing in the book. It's clear they understand the ideas behind the movement. They explicitly recognize the discipline required by agile developers and point out anti-patterns for project teams that mostly align with what agile teams know to be true.

Yes, it is weird to have the RUP guys talking about agile, but agile teams work best when they are focused on continuous improvement, and there is a lot to learn here for any development team.

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Unified Process Book, April 18, 2008

By 

Methods & Tools Editor "www.methodsandtools.com" (Vevey Switzerland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Agility and Discipline Made Easy: Practices from OpenUP and RUP (Paperback)

The goal of this book is to present good practices for software development that are based on OpenUP and RUP, but independently from these processes. The practices are grouped according to six principles:
* Demonstrate value iteratively
* Focus continuously on quality
* Balance stakeholder priorities
* Collaborate across teams
* Elevate the level of abstraction
* Adapt the process

For each practice, the authors propose a definition, practical advice on how to apply and adopt the practice, related practices and further readings. This material is very practical and contains many references to "real life" situations. The practices are selected from RUP and OpenUP and each chapter has a section devoted to compare the situation in other approaches, mainly XP and Scrum.

This book is full of practical knowledge and I will recommend it to every software developer. The only thing that bothers me is that the authors seemed to be forced to assign the "agile" label on their UP practices, with the implicit assumption that "if it is not waterfall, it is agile" and "if it is not agile it is not good".