The Unified Process Inception Phase: Best Practices in Implementing the UP

by Scott W. Ambler, Larry Constantine

Is the Unified Process the be all and end all standard for developing object-oriented component-based software? This book is the third in a four volume series that presents a critical review of the Unified Process. The authors present a survey of the alte

326 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2000

About the author

Scott W. Ambler is a Canadian software engineer, consultant and author, currently Senior Consulting Partner at Scott Ambler + Associates.

From Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 2 out of 5]

In my opinion, this book has not dated well. After a first, introductory chapter on the inception phase of the Unified Process methodology, it devotes a some clumsy chapter to the supposed best practices of six of the phase's ten workflows i.e. the Business Modeling, workflow (1), Requirements (2), Analysis and Design (3), Implementation, Deployment, Test(4), Configuration and Change Management, Project Management (5), (Tools) Environment (6), and Infrastructure Management. The best practices are in general disappointing; the authors first provide a short description of 4 to 18 informal, basically management-focused articles from Software Development and Computer Language, followed by the full text of the articles. The book includes a total of 41 of these articles. Some are still interesting or contain some key information, insights or experiences but they also tend to be reiterate a lot of introductory material and include dated material. Sometimes the book's criteria for inclusion is not at all clear and seems to reflect the authors' subjective criteria on what they deemed interesting back in 2000, criteria which does not distinguish between essential and secundary material. For example the chapter on best practices for the Business Modeling Workflow skips over key business modeling processes and limits itself to including five poorly fitting articles, including one on how UML models “fit together”, one on data-based design (!), one very simple and basic article on patterns and one CRC cards for analysis (!!!). The chapter on requirements includes nine articles, some of which sound positively quaint in 2022. In spite of its age, I found the article on internationalization quite interesting as a warning to managers and tech leads who need to develop software with internationalization. Although there is little testing in the inception phase, the authors includes a chapter on the testing workflow for this phase, where they emphasize the need for requirements and use case reviews and inspections.

Chapter 5, on “best practices” for project management, includes a whopping 18 articles (which make up almost half of the 41 articles included in the book), focusing on software development risk identification and management, effort and time estimation, software development metrics, outsourcing, and vendor selection.

If you are all interested by the book, I would recommend you quickly read through its first chapter and skim over the 41 articles, pausing only to read at most ten of those whose titles most draw your attention, such as

1. "Your Passport to Proper Internationalization";
2. "The Seven Deadly Sins of Software Reviews";
3. "Know Your Enemy: Software Risk Management";
4. "Managing Outsourced Projects";
5. "Selecting the Best Vendor";
6. "A Software Metrics Primer";
7. "Metrics: 10 Traps to Avoid";
8. "Scaling Up Management";
9. "The Ten Commandments of Tool Selection";
10. "Lessons Learned from Tool Adoption"