Development Process – Differences Between Unified Process and Rational Unified Process

I'm going to use Scrum as a concrete agile example. Scrum has three artifacts: the Product Backlog, the Sprint Backlog, and a Burndown Chart. A backlog is simply a prioritized list of things to do. The chart is for plotting your progress through the current sprint (iteration). These three tools are what you use to track and plan your project in Scrum and that is is your Scrum project plan.

RUP, on the other hand, contains a very long list of documents and artifacts for planning the project. As an example, there is the Iteration Plan, a detailed list of activities and tasks, with assigned resources and task dependencies. This document can perhaps be compared to the "sprint backlog" in Scrum, but that's stretching it.

So the major difference between these approaces is the amount of stuff (roles, artifacts, activities) they prescribe. And as you see from the image, the difference is huge:

RUP was very much en vogue about 10 years ago, but - as @Developer Art commented - it isn't talked about that much lately, parallel to the advent of Agile methods. Frankly, the latter are way simpler, practical and straightforward than RUP. And you can use UML regardless of the methodology you pick.

For me the only reason to use RUP would be if the client/sponsor/management absolutely insisted on doing so. And even then, RUP can - and should - be tailored to the specific project/team, so I tried to keep it as simple as possible :-)