The Enterprise Unified Process: Extending the Rational Unified Process

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!

Many IT organizations still pursue pet projects and develop duplicate applications in isolation, only to address later crises in corporate reporting, portfolio management, IT infrastructure, business objectives, and other areas.

EUP gives a coherent roadmap of how to architect smarter and for the long term. For organizations that don't have a strong enterprise aptitude, this book is a lifesaver. The EUP provides the business case for implementing EUP that will help cut through the politics by addressing the benefits to the bottom line for pursuing an Enterprise Unified Process.

I will be referencing the EUP regularly, and passing it around to others in my organization!

The Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) unites diverse disciplines, including development, enterprise architecture, operations, production and portfolio management, reuse and business process modeling, under an easy to follow framework. It was refreshing to find a book that recognizes the need to accommodate the installed base of existing software as part of the planning, development and deployment process. This is an excellent guide for any manager who wants to ensure that essential IT disciplines are addressed.

The focus of EUP is to enhance the commonly accepted Rational Unified Process (RUP). The authors have added new disciplines to RUP that include business modeling, portfolio management, enterprise administration, reuse, enterprise architecture and process improvement. The introduction of business modeling into the overall process is essential to weave IT processes and disciplines into the most essential driver of any systems initiative - the business. The enterprise architecture discussion was also refreshing given that many organizations have forgone this discipline and have created redundant, stovepipe applications and data structures that significantly stifle business agility.

The "Reuse" chapter raises the rarely deployed reuse strategy. It is critically important to not replicate business processes, models, systems, data structures, source code and interfaces. The costs and risks of trying to keep parallel assets synchronized have been written about extensively. This book promotes the idea that reuse is just another aspect of the enterprise unified process. It is also one of the few discussions about reuse that recognizes the value of harvesting existing assets.

Also of note is the portfolio management discussion that focuses attention on the need to incorporate project management with application management. It should be noted, however, that portfolio management has much less focus on applications than the traditional industry definition as promoted by Gartner, Inc.

Finally, this book makes great use of tips, tool references and citations to books or papers that readers can use to expand on their understanding of a given topic. The last chapter of the book takes a realistic and honest look at deploying the enterprise unified process, including its possible retirement.

This book is must readying for any organization using -- or attempting to use -- the RUP. The EUP's additional disciplines completes the RUP in a necessary and sufficient manner.
The book is written in a straight-forward manner, is easy to read and is well-organized. Each chapter reminds you to be practical (the antipatterns), explains how the additional discipline relates to the others and provides software tools and suggested reading.
Don't RUPture your software development efforts without having the more comprehensive approach of the EUP!

The book provides a very readable coverage of IBM's Rational Unified Process, as well as useful extensions that address important aspects of enterprise systems planning, development, and management. The systematic and disciplined treatment is greatly enhanced by the inclusion of much useful, pragmatic advice that draws from the practical experience of the authors in building real systems.
I quite liked this book. Although it doesn't give enough emphasis to conceptual data analysis (something RUP has always been weak on), it has loads of useful, practical content that make it a worthwhile addition to the literature.