Is Software Development always ordered?

Unified Software Process (USP). What? Okay, let’s start, imagine you have a project and start creating content for it, yet you do not have the amount of people you want knowing your project, what do you do? You start by hiring people to create a tool for you to approach your potential clients, but… do you just want to see the finished product, or want to see some phases?

If you opt to see phases, you would be going by the basis of the USP, last mentioned is -as mentioned in study.com– «an iterative, incremental, architecture-centric, and use-case driven approach to software development».

We have different approaches for different types of projects, let’s see some:

Use Case Driven Approach: This approach takes into account what the client wants, first we get the requirements and questions asked, then they start working.

Architecture Centric Approach: In this case people start by thinking what technologies we may use, you begin to structure the company who wants the service.

Iterative and Incremental Approach: Here we divide each project into smaller ones and each one of those into iterations, so every time we finish a small part of the project, we have an iteration that can be presented to the clients so they can approve and let us know we’re in the right direction.

In this process we have 4 phases, let’s get to know each one:

Inception: The primary goal of the Inception phase is to establish the case for the viability of the proposed system. We have some activities here:

• Defining the scope of the system (that is, what’s in and what’s out)
• Outlining a candidate architecture.
• Identifying critical risks and determining when and how the project will address them.
• Starting to make the business case that the project is worth doing.

Elaboration: The primary goal of the Elaboration phase is to establish the ability to build the new system given the different constraints. The key activities are:

• Capturing the majority of the functional requirements.
• Expanding an internal release of the system focused on describing the architecture.
• Addressing significant risks on an ongoing basis.
• Finalizing the business case for the project and preparing a project plan that contains sufficient detail to guide the next phase of the project.

Construction: The primary goal of the Construction phase is to build a system capable of operating successfully in beta customer environments. In this phase we do all the tasks regarding to the actual creation of the system.

Transition: The primary goal of the Transition phase is to roll out the fully functional system to customers. Here we just open and update our programs to all the clients.

One example of USP usage is Rational Unified Process, this is an agile software development methodology. The phases previously defined are used by this kind of method.

The main goal of RUP is to create high quality software with a predictable budget and time frame. Each of the life cycle phases can be repeated, if needed, until the main objectives are met. Once the transition stage is completed successfully, the project is finished.

We also have Agile Scrum, which is also a common unified software process which originates from the waterfall model cycle, here, each stage should be finished before we start another one.

At the end we can say that USP is a way of distributing work for better results and easier ways of obtaining what we want our project to be, so… would you like to see just the finished product, or some phases?

-RC