RE: [AM] The Spiral Model

Excellent - the industry needs case studies of successfully using RUP in an agile manner.

-----Original Message-----
From:	Barr Bill P [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent:	Fri 2/13/2004 8:16 AM
To:	'[email protected]'
Cc:	
Subject:	RE: [AM] The Spiral Model

> If I recall, I came away from those discussions concluding 
> that what makes RUP not agile in practice are:
> - the huge menu of practices to choose from makes it 
> difficult to start from a small enough set of practices to 
> stay lightweight.

Oh, how true. To placate the CMM crowd, I say we are using RUP. In practice,
I am enthusiastically culling the artifact list, just as RUP advises.

> - the accompanying document-centric tool set also makes it 
> hard to stay lightweight.

I use the tools to generate docs from the code to keep those who measure the
value of documentation not by function, but by weight, happy. 

> - the first phase is devoted to determining an architecture 
> given the initial requirements, thus not delivering any 
> business functionality early enough the customer to prime the 
> requirement refinement pump.  This increases the cost of 

We never get requirements from customers. We only get arcane requests and
statements of needs. As far as I can tell, a "need" is just their vision of
a requirement. We still have to translate those "needs" into geek-speak. No
way around that. In that respect, use cases, use case diagrams, CRC cards
and activity diagrams are incredibly helpful in extracting requirements.

One RUP practice that does help a lot is to break the system up into
components as quickly as possible. Once that is done, choose one component
and focus on that. This does allow for agility and helps to get something
out the door, faster.

Of course, having some agile DBAs on staff who say, "Don't worry, we can add
that later," or, "The design is flexible enough to extend the schema," is
extremely helpful!

Once we've been through a couple iterations and have pruned RUP
sufficiently, I'll do my best to write a message about the experience.

For more information about AM, visit the Agile Modeling Home Page at www.agilemodeling.com

For more information about AM, visit the Agile Modeling Home Page at www.agilemodeling.com
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