Annaliza E. Nebres

OOC

Book Review

Book: UML Explained

Author: Kendall Scott

Reference no.: QA 76.9 O35 S26 2001

Quotations (chapter 2)

“The life of a software system can be represented as a series of cycles. A cycle ends with the release of a version of a system to customers”.

The UML and Process

(The Four Phases)

The unified Process have four phases; Inception, Elaboration, Construction and Transition. A phase is simply the span of time between two major milestones. A point at which managers make important decisions whether to continue the projects.

The first phase is Inception which primary goal is to establish a workable proposed system. The tasks that it perform during Inception are: defining the scope of the system, outlining a candidate architecture, which made up initial versions of six different models, identifying critical risks and determining when and how the project will address them and starting to make the business case that the project is worth doing based o initial estimate costs, effort, schedule and product quality. The major milestone linked with this is called Life Cycle Objectives. The indications that they reached it was the following: the major stakeholders agree on the scope of the proposed system, the candidate architecture clearly address a set of critical high level requirements, the business for the project is strong enough to justify a green light for continued development.

The second phase is the Elaboration which Establish the ability to build the new system given the financial constraints, schedule constraints and other kinds of constraints that the development process focuses. The tasks it performs are: capturing a healthy majority of the remaining functional requirements, expanding the candidate architecture into a full architectural baseline, which is an internal release of the system focused on describing the architecture, addressing significant risks on an ongoing basis and finalizing the business case for the projects and preparing a project plan that contains detail sufficient to guide the next phase of the project. Architectural baselines contain expanded versions of six models initialized during the inception phase.  The major milestone associated with this is called Life Cycle Architecture. The indications that it reached the milestone are: most of the functional requirements for the new system have been captured in the use case model;  the architecture baseline is small, skinny system that will serve as a solid foundation for ongoing development and the business case has received a green light and the project team has an initial project plan that describes how the construction phase will proceed.

Third is the Construction Phase in which the system is build and it is capable of operating successfully in beta customer environment. The task of this phase is to build a system iteratively and incrementally and making sure that the viability of the system is always evident in executable form. The major milestone called Initial Operation Capability. It reached the milestone if a set of beta customers has a more or less fully operational system in their hand.

And last is the Transition Phase which is to roll out the fully functional system to customers. It task is to focus on correcting defects and modifying the problems to correct previously unidentified problems. The major milestone associated with this is called Product Release.