CDD Technology - RUP
The Rational Unified Process™(RUP) is an innovative software engineering process that enhances team productivity and delivers software best practices, ensuring the timely delivery of e-business solutions to clients.

The RUP makes process practical by providing prescriptive guidelines, templates and examples for all critical e-development activities. RUP is a customizable framework, which can easily be adapted to work the way you work. It is tightly integrated with Rational tools, allowing development teams to gain the full benefits of the Unified Modeling Language™ (UML), software automation, and other industry best practices.

Functionality
The Rational Unified Process was developed by Rational University for the object oriented technology they had founded. RUP follows a waterfall-like pattern and customizes it to meet the unique requirements of object-oriented design. The end result is scalable, distributed, multi tiered and works in conjunction with the Unified Modeling Language.

It is underpinned by a key practice - each project iteration cycle begins with clear objectives and concludes with an evaluation of whether they have been met - and focuses on 6 best practices designed to develop high quality enterprise applications:

1. Develop iteratively to mitigate risk early in the project
2. Effectively manage requirements
3. Model visually to manage complexity
4. Use component architectures to build resilient architecture
5. Verify quality throughout the lifecycle
6. Control changes to software

The CDD software engineering team through a number of phases - inception , elaboration, construction and transition.

The objective at the inception stage is to achieve concurrence among all stakeholders on the lifecycle objectives for the project (e.g. project scope, boundaries and associated conditions and acceptance criteria) and determination of project schedule, resources and cost.

The elaboration stage focuses on the engineering process and involves analysis of the software design architecture, base lining of the project vision and construction plan and rationalization of the project plan. The outcome of this stage include the system use case model, refined non-functional specifications, software architecture documentation, revised risk list and a development plan.

In the third phase, construction, the actual implementation /development begins. Objectives are to optimize resources and processes to produce a complete and fully functional software product..

In the final transitional stage, the software product is deployed and the objectives are for users to be self-supporting and for the project to be completed on time and budget, to vision and specifications. Beta testing, acceptance testing, training, fine tuning, project assessment and sign-off all occur at this stage.

Applying RUP for Business Benefit
RUP effectively eliminates risk early in the phase of the project and ensures that the client’s business requirements are totally satisfied by the end system/application produced. RUP is totally Web-enabled. It provides an online mentor or e-coach on each desktop plus presentation in HTML format for universal, platform-independent access across a corporate intranet. The result is a team of software engineers with easy access to the guidelines they need and the information they want - and, as a result, the ability to better support the development lifecycle.

The RUP provides the clear, repeatable process needed for the on-time, on-budget development of quality software, which meets current business requirements and is scalable to future needs.

CDD uses a version of RUP that has been specially tailored for effective web application development and, as a result, is able to reduce the time involved in engineering e-business solutions for our clients.

More information on CDD's selected methodology can be found here