The Essential Unified Process

I first heard about the "Essential Unified Process" several months ago, back when Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System was still in beta.

About that time, Microsoft and Ivar Jacobson--one of the three amigos who gave us UML--announced that Jacobson was working on a new process that would learn from the mistakes of RUP (Rational Unified Process) and other methodologies, resulting in a process that is both architecture centric and agile.

This certainly looked interesting and I became very excited. However, I began to get worried upon reading "The Essential Unified Process: An Introduction" published on Ivar's site. In particular, the paper promised that EUP will be "complete, sufficient, comprehensive, adaptive, scalable , flexible, lightweight, agile, universal" and so on and so forth.

This bothered me because my experience as an architect has shown me that the process is always a matter of trade-offs. You can't have everything and you need to determine which quality attributes are the most important, then focus on those. When something promises that it is perfect, I begin wondering what's the catch.

Well, I guess we'll find out soon enough, since the EUP is to be formally launched at the Natural History Museum in London on June 27, 2006. What's left now is to wait and see.

Posted by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz at 06:27 AM  Permalink