Ivar Jacobson to the rescue
Jacobson said he has no intention of bashing RUP.
“RUP has a lot of good stuff, but it needs a correction,” he said.
“First, I see RUP as raising the bar in many aspects. For instance, it is based on explicit knowledge and doesn’t just rely on tacit knowledge,” he said. It has a meta model that makes it possible to grow the process to cover all areas of software development, he added. And it has adopted a number of classical concepts that will stay for a very long time, he said.
However, among the primary problems Jacobson said he has with RUP is that it is “heavyweight.”
Also, “the process architecture needs to be refactored,” Jacobson said. “It is very difficult to add new practices because it will force a big change in the base. For instance, adding in a streamlined way practices such as EA [Enterprise Architect], SOA [service-oriented architecture], ABD [asset-based development], re-engineering legacy systems and commercial off-the-shelf software would be very difficult, if at all possible. So I believe in starting all over fresh but not throwing away anything that is good.”
Microsoft views Jacobson’s support as a major coup for the company’s efforts to win enterprise developers.
“This is me putting my money where my mouth is, which is we will support many processes,” said Rick LaPlante, general manager of Visual Studio Team System at Microsoft.
“A lot of the processes out there become so heavyweight that they become unusable,” LaPlante said, referring mostly to UML (Unified Modeling Language), but also to other process models.
I can’t wait to see the results!