Environment covers all activities that develop and maintain a supporting software development environment. Notice that all activities are not described in detail.

Configuring the Process To top of page

These activities configure the Rational Unified Process to suit the needs of the organization or project.

Developing Guidelines To top of page

These activity captures the lessons learned as the project progresses or completes, for developing additional guidelines (design guidelines, review guidelines, tool usage recommendations, and so on.)

Selecting and Acquiring Tools To top of page

Many of the steps in the process can only be efficiently carried on with the proper tool support. Tools need to be selected that fit the particular needs of an organization, based mostly on specific activities or artifacts necessary for the process:

  • Tools for modeling.
  • Tools for requirements management.
  • Tools for code development (editors, compilers debuggers).
  • Tools for configuration management and change management.
  • Tools for testing.
  • Tools for planning and tracking.
  • Tools for documentation.

The tools need to be acquired, installed and configured. The user community must be trained to use them. Specific project guidelines specify their usage: file naming conventions, procedures, scripts to automate certain tasks, and so on.

Toolsmithing To top of page

Sometimes special tools have to be developed internally to support special needs, provide additional automation of tedious or error-prone tasks, and provide better integration between tools. This tool development may proceed with a lighter weight process than the one used for developing the product.

Supporting the Development To top of page

This activity regroups a large range of technical services such as: maintaining the development environment, both hardware and software, system administration, backup, telecommunications, document creation and reproduction, and so on.

Training To top of page

In some cases, a development organization may be large enough to justify having its own internal training organization, to educate the developers on the tools, process, and techniques to be used on the project.

Implementing a Process in an Organization To top of page

Implementing a new development process and supporting tools in a software-development organization is a long-term task, that will span over several software-development projects. In some cases, a development organization can be large enough to have an internal organization, to develop, implement and maintain the process and tools to support all projects in the development organization. See Concepts: Implementing a Process in an Organization, for a step-by-step procedure for how to implement a process in an organization.

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© Rational Software Corporation 1998 Rational Unified Process 5.1 (build 43)