I have been reading the article entitled "A manager's introduction to RUP" and I have some doubts about what does iterations really mean on this methodology.
For what I know RUP has 4 phases: Inception, Elaboration, Construction and Transition; each of these phases has some "deliverables" or milestones that should be accomplished before going to the next phase.
Apart of that, I have like 9 disciplines that range from Business Modelling, Requirement elicitation, design, among others and ending with the environment phase. So if I want, for example, to make a selling system for a drugstore I suppose that my project should pass thru these 9 disciplines in each of the phases mentioned before.
So the iterative nature of RUP means that I can jump from top to bottom and bottom to top in these 9 disciplines for refining purposes; and should I do this for each of the phases? Or the iteration part means other thing?
Thanks
Best Answer
The first thing to keep in mind is that the Rational Unified Process is a process framework. It provides some constraints to allow organizations to build their own process around, with tailoring to let organizations choose what is appropriate for their needs.
I think the image on the Wikipedia article is a pretty good representation of the process framework.
Your four phases - Inception, Elaboration, Construction, and Transition are sequential. In a given project, you'll be in each one once. However, in each phase and within each iteration of a phase, you'll spend different amounts of time in the 9 (6 engineering and 3 supporting) disciplines.
You can see this in the diagram. Although some aspects aren't shown. For example, the diagram only shows one Inception iteration, but there could be many. Some disciplines lend themselves better to Inception than other disciplines - for example, Project Management, Business Modeling, Requirements, Environment, Configuration Management. The Inception phase has criteria for completion - agreed upon scope, primary use cases identified, a managed development process, project plan baselines, etc. Each iteration could have a different emphasis on work that needs to achieve the completion criteria, meaning the types of and effort put into the disciplines will vary within each iteration.
The same applies to the Elaboration, Construction, and Transition phases. Each one could have one or more iterations that show progress toward the end goals of that phase.