Chapter 3

Static Structure: Process Description

Model of Rational Unified Process

• A process describes who is doing what, how, and when.

• RUP is represented using five primary elements:

– Roles: the who– Activities: the how– Artifacts: the what– Workflows: the when– Disciplines: the "container" for the preceding four kinds of element

Role, Activities, and Artifact

Roles

• Behavior is expressed in terms of activities the role performs

• Responsibilities of each role are expressed in relation to certain artifacts that the role creates, modifies, or controls.

• Roles are not individuals– Roles describe how individuals should behave in the business and

the responsibilities of each individual.

• Relationship between an individual to roles is one-to-many– A person may play the project manager for hours, then play the

architect role for the rest of the morning.

A role defines the behavior and responsibilities of an individual or of a group of individuals working together as a team

Example of Roles

• System Analyst– Coordinates requirements elicitation and use-case modeling by

outlining system’s functionality and delimiting the system

• Designer– Defines the responsibilities, operations, attributes, and

relationships of one or more classes– Determines how they should be adjusted to implementation

environment

• Test Designer– Responsible for planning, design, implementation, and evaluation

of tests– Generating test plan and test model– Implementing test procedures,– Evaluating test coverage, results, and effectiveness

People and Roles

Roles• Roles are organized in five main categories:

1. Analyst roles• Business-Process Analyst, Business Designer, System Analyst,

Requirements Specifier

2. Developer roles• Software Architect, Designer, User-Interface Designer, Capsule Designer,

Database Designer, Implementer, Integrator

3. Tester roles• Test Analyst, Test Designer, Tester

4. Manager roles• Project Manager, Change Control Manager, Configuration Manager, Test

Manager, Deployment Manager, Process Engineer, Management Reviewer

5. Production and support roles• System Administrator, Technical Writer, Graphic Artist, Tool Specialist,

Course Developer

Additional Roles• Reviewer

– Responsible for providing timely feedback to project team members on the artifacts they have produced.

• Review Coordinator– Responsible for facilitating formal reviews and inspections, and

ensuring that they occur when required and are conducted to a satisfactory standard.

• Any Role– This is a generic role used to carry the activities that any project

member can perform.

• Stakeholder– Anyone who is materially affected by the outcome of the project.

Roles are denoted in the RUP prefixed with the word Role, as in Role: Integration Tester

Activities

• Every activity is assigned to one specific role.

• The purpose of activity is to create or update artifacts, such as a model, a class, or a plan

• An activity may take up a few hours to a few days.

• Activities may be repeated several times on the same artifact, especially from one iteration to another.

• Repeated activities are performed by the same role but not necessarily the same individual.

An activity is a unit of work that an individual in that role may be asked to perform and that produces a meaningful result in the context of the project.

Examples of Activities

• Plan an iteration: – performed by the Role: Project Manager

• Find use cases and actors: – performed by the Role: System Analyst

• Review the design: – performed by the Role: Design Reviewer

• Execute a performance test: – performed by the Role: Performance Tester

Activities are prefixed with the word Activity, as in Activity: Find use case and actors.

Activity Steps

• Steps fall into three main categories:

– Thinking steps• The person playing the role understands the nature of the task, gathers

and examines the input artifacts, and formulates the outcome.

– Performing steps• The person playing the role creates or updates some artifacts.

– Reviewing steps• The person playing the role inspects the results against some criteria.

Activity: Find Use Cases and Actors

• For example, this activity is decomposed into these seven steps:

1. Find actors.

2. Find use cases.

3. Describe how actors and use cases interact.

4. Package use cases and actors.

5. Present the use-case model in use-case diagrams.

6. Develop a survey of the use-case model.

7. Evaluate your results.

Thinking

Performing

Reviewing

Artifacts

• An artifact is a piece of information that is produced, modified, or used by a process.

• It is the things the project produces or uses while working toward the final product.

• Artifacts are used as input by roles to perform an activity

• Artifacts are the result or output of such activities.

Examples of Artifacts

• A model, such as the use-case model or the design model

• A model element—an element within a model—such as a class, a use case, or a subsystem

• A document, such as a business case or software architecture document

• Source code

• Executables

Note: artifact is the term used in the Rational Unified Process. Other processes use terms such as work product, work units, deliverables, etc.

Major Artifacts of RUP

More About Artifacts

• Artifacts can also be composed of other artifacts. For example, the design model contains many classes

• Artifacts are very likely to be subject to version control and configuration management.

• The RUP discourages the systematic production of paper documents.

• Managing project artifacts is to maintain the artifacts within the appropriate tool used to create and manage them

• Delivering artifacts to the interested parties inside and together with the tool rather than on paper.

More About Artifacts

• Every piece of information should be the responsibility of a specific person, artifacts are the responsibility of a single role.

• Even though one person may "own" the artifact, many people may use this artifact, perhaps even updating it if they have been given permission.

Artifacts are denoted in the process prefixed with the word artifact, as in Artifact: Use-Case Storyboard.

Reports

• Models and model elements can have associated reports.

• A report extracts information about models and model elements from a tool

• A report presents an artifact or a set of artifacts for a review

• Unlike regular artifacts, reports are not subject to version control. They can be produced at any time by going back to the artifacts that generated them.

Sets of Artifacts

• Artifacts of the RUP have been organized into information sets that are aligned with the core disciplines.

– Management set• Planning artifacts, such as the software development plan (SDP), the

business case• Operational artifacts, such as a release description, status

assessments, deployment documents, and defect data

– Requirements set• The vision document• Requirements in the form of stakeholders' needs, use-case model,

and supplementary specification

– Design set• The design model• The architecture description

Sets of Artifacts (cont.)

– Implementation set• The source code and executables

• The associated data files or the files needed to produce them– Deployment set

• Installation material

• User documentation

• Training material

Growing the Information Sets

The information sets evolve throughout Iterations of the development cycle.

Core Disciplines

Disciplines are "containers" used to organize activities of the process.

Core process disciplines

Workflows

• In UML terms, a workflow can be expressed as a sequence diagram, a collaboration diagram, or an activity diagram

• However, a form of activity diagrams is used here.

A workflow is a sequence of activities that produces a result of observable value.

Workflows

• The Rational Unified Process uses three types of workflow:

– Core Workflows• Associated to each discipline.

– Workflow details• Use workflow details to express a specific group of closely related

activities for each core workflows

– Iteration plans• selecting the activities that will be effectively run during the iteration

and replicating them as necessary

Example of Workflow

Additional Process Elements

• Other elements are added to activities or artifacts to – make the process easier to understand and use – provide more comprehensive guidance to the practitioners.

• These additional process elements are:– Guidelines– Templates– Tool mentors– Concepts

Adding Templates, Tool Mentors, Guidelines

These elements enhance the primary elements.

Guidelines

• Guidelines are rules, recommendations, or heuristics that support activities and steps.

• Guidelines describe well-formed artifacts, focusing on their specific qualities,

• Guidelines describe specific techniques to create certain artifacts or the transformations from one artifact to another or the use of UML.

Types of Guidelines

• Work guidelines– Give practical advice on how to undertake an activity, especially for

group activities;• Work guidelines for reviews

• Work guidelines for a use-case workshop

• Work guidelines for programming, such as programming in pairs

• Artifact guidelines – Associated with a particular artifact and describe how to develop,

evaluate, and use the artifact;• Modeling guidelines,

• Programming guidelines, for languages such as Java, C++, or Ada,

• User-interface guidelines

• Guidelines on how to create a specific artifact, such as a risk list or an iteration plan

• Checkpoints used as part of a review to verify that an activity is complete

Templates

• Templates are models, or prototypes, of artifacts.

• One or more templates are associated with the artifact description used to create the corresponding artifacts.

• Examples of templates are listed below:

– Microsoft Word templates for documents and some reports– SoDA templates for Microsoft Word or FrameMaker that extract

information from tools such as Rational Rose,– RequisitePro, or TeamTest– HTML templates for the various elements of the process– Microsoft Project template for the project plan and iteration plan

Tool Mentors

• Additional means of providing guidance by showing practitioners how to perform the steps using a specific software tool.

• Tool mentors are provided in RUP, linking its activities with tools such as Rational Rose, Rational XDE, RequisitePro, ClearCase, ClearQuest, and TestStudio.

• The tool mentors almost completely encapsulate the dependencies of the process on the tool set, keeping the activities free from tool details.

A Process Framework

• Roles, artifacts, activities, guidelines, concepts, and mentors are the elements that we can add or replace to evolve or adapt the process to the organization's needs.

• The organization of RUP in this chapter is based on an industry standard called the Software Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM).

Summary

• The Rational Unified Process model is built on three fundamental entities: roles, activities, and artifacts.

• Disciplines are natural groupings of process activities, roles, and artifacts.

• Workflows relate activities, artifacts, and roles in sequences that produce valuable results.

• Guidelines, templates, and tool mentors complement the description of the process by providing detailed guidance to the practitioner.

• The Rational Unified Process is an open process framework based on an industry standard called SPEM.