The Rational Unified Process Made Easy: A Practitioner's Guide to Rational Unified Process

The Object Primer : Agile Model-Driven Development with UML 2.0

Uml

The Enterprise Unified Process : Extending the Rational Unified Process

Format: Paperback
Author: Scott W. Ambler
ReleaseDate: 11 February, 2005
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Rating:

No application is an island


EUP gives a coherent roadmap of how to architect smarter and for the long term. Many IT organizations still pursue pet projects and develop duplicate applications in isolation, only to address later crises in corporate reporting, portfolio management, IT infrastructure, business objectives, and other areas. For organizations that don't have a strong enterprise aptitude, this book is a lifesaver. The EUP provides the business case for implementing EUP that will help cut through the politics by addressing the benefits to the bottom line for pursuing an Enterprise Unified Process.

I will be referencing the EUP regularly, and passing it around to others in my organization!.

Uniting diverse disciplines...under an easy to follow framework
It was refreshing to find a book that recognizes the need to accommodate the installed base of existing software as part of the planning, development and deployment process. The Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) unites diverse disciplines, including development, enterprise architecture, operations, production and portfolio management, reuse and business process modeling, under an easy to follow framework. This is an excellent guide for any manager who wants to ensure that essential IT disciplines are addressed.

The focus of EUP is to enhance the commonly accepted Rational Unified Process (RUP). The authors have added new disciplines to RUP that include business modeling, portfolio management, enterprise administration, reuse, enterprise architecture and process improvement. The introduction of business modeling into the overall process is essential to weave IT processes and disciplines into the most essential driver of any systems initiative - the business. The enterprise architecture discussion was also refreshing given that many organizations have forgone this discipline and have created redundant, stovepipe applications and data structures that significantly stifle business agility.

The "Reuse" chapter raises the rarely deployed reuse strategy. It is critically important to not replicate business processes, models, systems, data structures, source code and interfaces. The costs and risks of trying to keep parallel assets synchronized have been written about extensively. This book promotes the idea that reuse is just another aspect of the enterprise unified process. It is also one of the few discussions about reuse that recognizes the value of harvesting existing assets.

Also of note is the portfolio management discussion that focuses attention on the need to incorporate project management with application management. It should be noted, however, that portfolio management has much less focus on applications than the traditional industry definition as promoted by Gartner, Inc.

Finally, this book makes great use of tips, tool references and citations to books or papers that readers can use to expand on their understanding of a given topic. The last chapter of the book takes a realistic and honest look at deploying the enterprise unified process, including its possible retirement.
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Must reading for any RUP organization
The EUP's additional disciplines completes the RUP in a necessary and sufficient manner. This book is must readying for any organization using -- or attempting to use -- the RUP.
The book is written in a straight-forward manner, is easy to read and is well-organized. Each chapter reminds you to be practical (the antipatterns), explains how the additional discipline relates to the others and provides software tools and suggested reading.
Don't RUPture your software development efforts without having the more comprehensive approach of the EUP! .