Unified Software Development Process: A Software Development Method

Unified Software Development Process: A Software Development Method

Introduction

Today, given the importance of information as a strategic resource that helps create competitive advantage, companies tend to build increasingly systems which involved large and complex teams made ??up of many people with different functions and roles. This situation leads us to define mechanisms that help us manage these large projects: schedule activities in a timely manner, coordinate the activities of each team member and each other, and provide criteria to allow control and measurement of these activities. A high percentage of systems fail for not having a proper process development, or inappropriate use. Many developers are wrong in the sense that they think software development begins with the programming language which is one of the most important causes of system failure (Bentley, Whitten & Randolph, 2007, pp. 33-39).

Whatever the size of the system, the companies and individuals concerned with the task of system or software development must always rely on a process of extensive analysis and design.

Purpose of the Study

The merger of two companies to form a White Horse Ferries poses a great challenge for the management in terms of integrating the development teams of both companies previously had keeping in view their diverse skills and background. The management also decided to develop the new scheduling and booking system in-house , a task which calls for a comprehensive and integrating software development strategy that would, addressing the risk involved in the process, address the core issues of software development and result in satisfactory end system catering to the needs of company. The present study aims to identify a suitable methodology to achieve abovementioned objective.

Discussion

In many ways Unified Process is very similar to the classic Waterfall model, although, because of its flexibility it can be customized to be used as an agile software development process. There is really no definite or limited steps on how it should be implemented, its application would depend on how an organization decides to use it.

The core of UP's framework has the following attributes:

Gather knowledge on the project that should be done

Assess the needs of the client and build a list of project requirements from the gathered information

Analyze and design the project software

Implement the design, testing and deployment

These attributes are applied to the four phases of a Unified process project.

Each phase can be iterated per workflow as the software lifecycle moves through the phases.

The four phases of Unified Process are:

Inception deals with data gathering and project planning

Possible outputs:

Workshop requirements

specifications

prototyping

Elaboration deals with the iterations to be done during the project cycle based on the defined project / software architecture

Possible tasks/outputs: 

requirements workshop

refining vision

refining the process environment

Construction is the phase wherein the project software is actually built and extensively tested. The documentation should also be finished under this stage.

Possible tasks/outputs: 

short iterations of testing, programming, designing

stakeholder evaluation & steering

evaluations

create all documents

Transition is the phase wherein the project software is declared as complete and delivered to the client for deployment.

Possible tasks/outputs: 

stakeholder feedback

final documentation

deployment

Figure 1: The iteration is enclosed within a ...