Concepts: Underlying Model of the Rational Unified Process

This is a description of the underlying model (sometimes called a meta-model) of the Rational Unified Process (RUP). For an introduction to the basic concepts of the Rational Unified Process, see Introduction to the Rational Unified Process.

The model is described in several diagrams, to make the presentation easier to understand. There is a one diagram which describes a "static view of the Rational Unified Process", with the "business objects", such as workers, their activities, artifacts, all related information, and their interrelationships. There is another diagram, which gives a "workflow of the Rational Unified Process", describing core process workflow, iteration workflow, workflow details, and how they are related. with workers, activities, and artifacts. Finally there are some miscellaneous information that can be viewed as attributes on the Rational Unified Process as a whole.

Topics

• Static View of the Rational Unified Process
• Workflow View of the Rational Unified Process
• Miscellaneous

Static View of the Rational Unified Process

• A worker defines the behavior and responsibilities of an individual, or a set of individuals working together as a team. This is an important distinction because it is natural to think of a worker as the individual or the team itself. In the Rational Unified Process, the worker is more of a role that defines how the individuals should carry out the work.

• An activity is the smallest piece of work that is relevant. For example, it is not reasonable to do only part of an activity. Dividing the work in this manner makes it easier to monitor development. It is better (easier) to know that the project has completed three out of five activities rather than 60% of one activity.

• Artifacts are the modeling constructs and documents that activities evolve, maintain, or use as input. An artifact can be any of the following:

• A document, such as Business Case or Software Architecture Document
• A model, such as the Use-Case Model or the Design Model
• A model element, i.e. an element within a model, such as a class, or a subsystem.

• The review activities have checkpoints associated with them, that are used when reviewing artifacts. The checkpoints are organized per artifact.

• Report. Models and model elements, have reports associated with them. A report extracts information about models and model elements from a tool. A report presents an artifact or a set of artifacts.

• Template. There are a number of ready-to-use templates, which present documents and artifacts. The Rational Unified Process provides templates to use with Microsoft® Word, SoDA, Microsoft Project 98.

• Tool mentor. Most activities in the Unified Process are supported by software-engineering tools. For some activity, and even some steps within an activity, there is a description, a tool mentor, which describes how to perform the activity using the tools of the Rational tool suite

• Guideline. For most artifacts the Unified Process process provides guidelines with detailed information about the artifact.

• Work guideline. The Unified Process process provides work guidelines with practical information about the how to perform certain task, such as workshops, reviews. These work guidelines are referenced from the activity descriptions, where they are used.

• Core workflow. A core workflow shows all activities you may go through to produce a particular set of artifacts. We describe these workflows at an overview level - a summary of all workers, activities, and artifacts that are involved. We also show at a more detailed level how worker collaborate and use and produce artifacts. The steps at this detailed level are called "workflow details".
• Each core workflow has an introduction.
• To be able to understand a core workflow, there are certain concepts that you need to understand.
• Each core workflow has an activity overview.
• Each core workflow has an artifact overview.
• Iteration workflow. An iteration workflow shows all workers, activities and artifacts that would be involved in a particular execution of an iteration in the software lifecycle. We show a few sample iterations, typical for a phase in the lifecycle.
• Workflow detail. Primary purpose is to describe how activities are performed in "reality". Normally more than one activity is performed together. Workflow details are groupings of activities that are done "together", presented with input and resulting artifacts. The workflow details are not necessarily performed in sequence, you may alternate between them during an iteration. Note that all not workflows have workflow details defined for them.

There are some additional "things" in the Rational Unified Process.

• The Introduction Manual, which introduces the Rational Unified Process, and gives an overview of all concepts.
• A glossary of all terms used in the Rational Unified Process.
• References to external sources.
• White Papers, which goes into more detail in some topics related to the Rational Unified Process.