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Deploying the OpenUP Open-Source Process

OpenUP’s benefits can be achieved when the team is tightly integrated, self-organizing and highly communicative. A critical part of this is the Agile part of the process: everyone must be an integrated part of the team.

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Note: This is the second part in a three-part series. The first installment ran in the August/September issue.

In the last issue of IBM* Systems Magazine, Open Systems edition I introduced OpenUP, an open-source Agile and Unified software development process. This article discusses how to:

• Acquire OpenUP and the EPF Composer tool
• Deploy OpenUP to a small team
• Make minor modifications to the process

Like OpenUP, the practices described here can also be leveraged by larger organizations looking to deploy OpenUP or other processes. The next article in this series will describe more sophisticated deployment techniques that rely heavily on the EPF Composer tool.

Get the Process

The easiest way to use OpenUP is to download the process online and use it as is (www.eclipse.org/ epf/downloads/downloads.php).

OpenUP 1.0 was released in August. Intermediate enhancements to the process appear in the weekly builds. You can download two items: the method library and the published process. If you plan to use OpenUP as is, you should download the published process. This is the HTML Web site where practitioners get information about how to successfully perform Agile and Unified best practices.

If you plan to modify or extend the process, then you'll also need the method library and the EPF Composer tool. The method library is the source for the process. EPF Composer allows you to modify and publish the method library to create a customized process.

What's Missing?

OpenUP focuses on the team's needs. This means that some activities that are organizational in nature aren't described in OpenUP. This keeps the process lightweight, but one side effect is that there's no environment discipline, which explains how to modify and deploy the process to fit a particular team's needs. Since every environment is different, your team may want to include corporate templates, examples from other projects or extra guidance. In this case you'll want to modify the process by editing it using EPF Composer.

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