Essentially Practical

My September DDJ arrived this week. One article I especially enjoyed was Ivar Jacobson, Pan Wei Ng, and Ian Spence describing the Essential Unified Process (EssUP). Ivar, of course, is one of the geniuses|culprits who is to be thanked|blamed for bestowing|inflicting the Rational Unified Process (RUP) upon us all. Depending on your point of view, the RUP is either the best thing since sliced bread or a process-heavy monstrosity good only for killing lots of trees.

Lo and behold, Ivar and company have been listening to the debates and flames and discussions and have an answer: what they call the Essential Unified Process. I'm no RUP expert, so I can't say whether the EssUP is merely the RUP with its many components un-conjoined. Certainly I expect that the EssUP has been informed by the RUP. But the EssUP seems to be more of a, well, not even a spin-off, really, and certainly not just RUP V2.

The gist of the EssUP seems to be a) making the process the primary thing, rather than all the practices and stuff you have to do to implement the process, and b) making concerns that should be orthogonal to each other actually be orthogonal to each other. So, for example, you can take up just those processes (or parts of a process) that seem useful right now, enabling you to pick up individual pieces parts that will have a big impact now and slowly integrate your way over to full-on EssUP (which, actually, you would seem to be doing the moment you decide you only need a single small chunk of it).

Of course there's plenty of stuff you can buy to help the process along. EssUP has picked up the card theme Extreme Programming has used since ever, even going so far as to talk about dealing artifact, activity, and competency cards out to your team so they know what they're doing this iteration. This all seems a bit cutesy to me; a nicely medium-sized laminated card should make a nice reference, but is any team lead really going to pass these out to their team saying "Here's what you're doing today, have fun"? (Yes, I know, team leads will - those same team leads who don't really understand what they're doing today, but fake it with lots of process.) And perhaps all this card-related talk is more a metaphor than something expected to be done. It still seems cutesy to me.

But I do like the general idea: Here are a bunch of process-y things that might help you develop better software more rapidly. Take just those pieces that seem useful, integrate them in to your existing process, then come back for more when and if you need it. This might actually catch on!

Nah - it's much too practical. <g/>

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink