Rational Unified Process

Rational Unified Process is a system development process for developing systems with objects and/or components based technologies. It consists of four phases and nine disciplines. The four phases are executed sequentially while the disciplines are performed iteratively throughout the four phases.

At Almighty Technologies, the licenses of software used in our state-of-art development Almighty Technologies adopts the Spiral Progressive Approach to deliver a project. The salient features of this approach are:

Phases of Rational Unified Process

The four phases are:

Inception
Technical Design - Elaboration
Construction - Coding
Transition

In addition to the above four mentioned phases, Post project support is also included in the Almighty Technologies project development life cycle.

Phase 1- Project Initiation (Inception): This is the explanatory phase of the project. Project objective and description is described at this stage. The purpose of this phase is to collect and understand business requirements, detail the project plan and agree upon a high level statement of work. This phase identifies the project’s primary objectives, assumptions, constraints, deliverables and acceptance criteria.
Phase 2- Technical Design (Elaboration): In this phase, the architecture of the system is designed. The goal is to translate requirements and specification into a technical solution to produce Technical Design. High Level Design deals with overall architecture and framework of the project e.g. project is decomposed into modules/functions/entities/classes etc. whereas Low Level Design deals with more details of the project like it incorporates pseudo code and definitions of all technical interfaces of the project.
Phase 3- Construction: In this phase, the complete development of the system based upon the baselined architecture takes place. Here, emphasis is laid on optimizing costs, schedules and quality
Phase 4- Transition: This phase includes testing of the product in preparation of release and fine tuning the product and taking care of issues like configuring, installing and usability issues. The focus of this phase is to ensure that software is available for its end users.
Phase 5- Post Project Support: This is a specific timeframe in which Almighty Technologies would provide support and fixes for bugs encountered in the functioning of the system. We implement “Change Request” approach in support phase.

Disciplines of Rational Unified Process:

The nine disciplines that are performed iteratively throughout the four phases are:

Business Modeling	To understand the business of the organization that is relevant for the system to be developed. Also, if needed, possibility of re-engineering business process is also explored and potential strategies are evaluated.
Requirements	The scope of the project is defined. The specification documents are prepared to identify the functional (like usage, business rules, user interface) and non-functional requirements of the project.
Analysis and Design	The program source code is developed and unit testing is done.
Test	This discipline ensures quality of the system developed. It consists of finding bugs, ensuring that the system works as per the design of the system and meets all requirements mentioned in the specification documents.
Deployment	This includes planning and executing delivery of software and supporting documentations ready to be deployed and making the system available to end users.
Configuration and Change Management	This includes managing baselines of the project, accepting and managing change requirements, changing and delivering configuration items and managing releases.
Project management	This includes assigning tasks, managing risks, tracking progress etc to ensure on time and within budget delivery of the product.
Environment	This includes ensuring proper tools are available whenever required.