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The Enterprise Unified Process: Extending the Rational Unified Process Review by James Taylor
A solid IT methodology for the enterprise
If you are using the Rational Unified Process, or considering doing so, and worried about applying it to a whole IT department rather than separate projects then this book could well be useful. The book has four parts - From RUP to EUP, Beyond Development, Enterprise Management Disciplines and Putting it all Together. Each section has several chapters and the chapters all start with a nice reader ROI section (showing the payoff for reading that chapter). The writing is clear and there are plenty of diagrams, tables and helpful tips.
The book starts of with some background in the RUP. I particularly liked the description of RUP as serial in the large and iterative in the small. Within the RUP there are also nine disciplines (Business Modeling, Requirements, Analysis and Design, Implementation, Test, Deployment, Configuration and Change Management, Project Management, and Environment). The authors outline 10 best practices they see as core to the EUP (they extend the original 6 in RUP) - Develop iteratively, Manage requirements, Proven architecture, Modeling, Continuously verify quality, Manage change, Collaborative development, Look beyond deployment, Deliver working software regularly and Manage risk. Each is clearly described.
In addition to the change best practices, EUP adds a Production phase and a Retirement phase. They point out that the Production phase is not just maintenance or just operations and support but both and more. I think that any organization building systems should spend as much time and effort thinking about production and running their application in production (which includes maintaining it over time) as they do in building it and I was glad to see this so strongly proposed. They also added an operations and support discipline, mostly but not entirely in the production phase. This discipline includes running the system and making hot fixes. I think the Retirement phase is overkill for most organizations but some will find it useful.
They also added some "Enterprise Management" disciplines for use outside the context of a project and this too is a good idea. The disciplines are Enterprise business modeling, Enterprise Portfolio Management, Enterprise Architecture (I particularly liked the idea that "modifiability" should be considered as part of an enterprise architecture - far too few organizations do this well and fail to differentiate between stable services and much more changeable ones), Strategic Reuse (Again I liked the called-out focus on this - without a real plan no reuse is going to happen), People management , Enterprise Administration and Software Process Improvement (Another good one and a timely reminder to all that you should keep improving your software processes)
Overall I liked the book, though it was a somewhat dry subject (as methodologies often are). There was a lot of good advice, some nice tips and some clearly hard-won experience being shared!