Wednesday, December 28, 2005

RAD methodology

James Martin, in his book first coining the term, wrote, “Rapid ApplicationDevelopment (RAD) is a development lifecycle designed to give much faster development and higher-quality results than those achieved with the traditional lifecycle. It is designed to take the maximum advantage of powerful development software that has evolved recently.

RAD method has a task list and a work breakdown structure that is designed for speed. Among the most important techiques in RAD:

Prototyping - an approach based on creating a demonstrable result as early as possible and refining that result. The refinement is based on feedback from the business, the eventual users of the system. Prototyping requires an open approach to development, it also requires an emphasis on relationship management and change management.

Iteration - is a commitment to incremental development based on refinement. Prototyping and iteration go hand in hand.

Timeboxing - is a management technique that focuses attention on delivery above all else. Under a timebox scope can change but delivery cannot.


Thus It is a process through which the development cycle of an application is expedited. It enables quality products to be developed faster, saving valuable resources


Monday, December 19, 2005

R U P again

Right no more passing on of personal experience lets get technical for the not so technical job...

Talking about RUP , it is an iterative software development process created by the Rational Software Corporation, now bought over by IBM. The RUP is not a single concrete prescriptive process, but rather an adaptable process framework. As such, RUP describes how to develop software effectively using proven techniques. While the RUP encompasses a large number of different activities, it is also intended to be tailored, in the sense of selecting the development processes appropriate to a particular software project or development organization. The RUP is recognized as particularly applicable to larger software development teams working on large projects. The software by Rational provides tools and technology for customizing and executing the process.

Overviews of the Rational Unified Process

  • The Inception phase : During the inception phase the core idea is developed into a product vision. In this phase, we review and confirm our understanding of the core business drivers. We want to understand the business case for why the project should be attempted. The inception phase establishes the product feasibility and delimits the project scope
  • The Elaboration phase : During the elaboration phase the majority of the Use Cases are specified in detail and the system architecture is designed. This phase focuses on the "Do-Ability" of the project. We identify significant risks and prepare a schedule, staff and cost profile for the entire project.
  • The Construction phase : During the construction phase the product is moved from the architectural baseline to a system complete enough to transition to the user community. The architectural baseline grows to become the completed system as the design is refined into code.
  • The Transition phase : In the transition phase the goal is to ensure that the requirements have been met to the satisfaction of the stakeholders. This phase is often initiated with a beta release of the application. Other activities include site preparation, manual completion, and defect identification and correction. The transition phase ends with a postmortem devoted to learning and recording lessons for future cycles.

Examination or Milestones:

In RUP there are four major milestones or Examination that correspond to the four phases(Above). If the milestone criteria are not met, the project can be stopped or run in a new iteration to revisit the bottlenecks. Milestones are connected to a Deliverable. This meta-model of a milestone emphasizes the links between phases, iterations and milestone completion/ Examination


Iterations :

To understand even a bit of RUP it is important to know about Iterations.
Basic Defination : An iterative method attempts to solve a problem (for example an equation or system of equations) by finding successive approximations to the solution starting from an initial guess
Accorsing to WiKipedia a typical project using the RUP will go through several iterations. Dividing the project into iterations has advantages, such as risk mitigation, but it also needs more guidance and effort than the traditional sequential approach.
The RUP defines a Project Management Discipline that guides the project manager through iteration management. Using iterations, a project will have one overall phase plan, but multiple iteration plans. Involvement from stakeholders is often encouraged at each milestone. In this manner, milestones serve as a means to obtain stakeholder buy in while providing a constant measure against requirements and organizational readiness for the pending launch.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

R U P & A C R O N Y M S

isnt it RUP ? yeah right it is.. how ever a few days back speaking to a Product Manager (and yeah am not gonna quote him) he got offended on use of acroynms like RUP / SAP /RAD and so on not being said as three diffrent words like R -- U -- P & S -- A-- P but just like RUP ,SAP & so on.. so in defrence to him and obviously trying to be more intelligent after that conversation i'll surely avoid using Acronyms from now on ..

Some lesson Huh.. ;0)

Adios

P.S. : Had a long day so never mind the RUP things.. will talk about it next time for sure...