Under the proposal, IBM will contribute roughly 15% of RUP content, including core best practices for iterative development and web-based tooling for accessing and extending the best practices. The bundle will also cover the metadata foundation already submitted to the Object Management Group (OMG) for the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative.
In effect, IBM is open sourcing RUP lite, a practice that is pretty typical for vendors seeking to stimulate interest so they can increase sales for the core product.
IBM’s initiative to donate part of RUP to Eclipse is backed by several major consulting firms such as CapGemini, BearingPoint, Covansys, Number Six Software, Armstrong Process Group, and Unisys (which maintains a large software process practice alongside its server business).
The initiative has also been endorsed by Ivar Jacobson, who helped developed the concept of Use Case modeling while at Rational, and by Scott Ambler, a major authority on agile development.
The move one-ups Compuware’s recent announcement of its intent to partner with Serena in leading an Eclipse software development life cycle tooling project. And, in part, it answers the question, where’s Rational?
Given that Rational, not Compuware, was the first major vendor after the implosion of CASE Computer-Aided Software Engineering) in the early 90s to propose the concept of a full life cycle of software development tools, from requirements and design to source code control and testing, it was reasonable to ask why IBM allowed Compuware to steal the thunder recently. Compuware and Serena came much later to the life cycle game.
Maybe it’s also a hint that Rational considers process its real family jewel.
Conceived a decade ago as Rational was cementing thought leadership in iterative development, RUP consists of web-based content that documents and provides terminology for best practices, workflows, and artifacts involved in iterative development; a meta data model which defines its concepts; and tools that customers can use to customize RUP to their own corporate software development processes.
RUP itself dates back to Rational’s three amigos period, when its team of Grady Booch, Jim Rumbaugh, and Jacobson helped define and steer UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagrams as the core syntax for software design modeling. During that period, Rational acquired tools covering the entire software life cycle except for integrated development environments (IDEs).
RUP was the last major piece of that puzzle. While UML provided a language of object-oriented software design and Rational’s tools offered the means for developing software, RUP specified the underlying process for how to do it. Developed by Rational’s Philip Krutchen, it reigned for a while as the definitive process for model-based, iterative software development.
However, RUP languished once Mr Krutchen left Rational shortly after the IBM acquisition. Meanwhile, fragments of lighter processes, from Agile to Extreme Programming, Scrum, and others have entered the agenda in recent years.
While many of the new ideas weren’t necessarily antithetical to RUP, in recent years Rational has been slow to respond, being preoccupied with finding its place inside IBM’s stable.
But Rational’s Per Kroll claims that over the past year, RUP has made up lost ground, leveraging IBM expertise to add more content than in any other single year. For instance, RUP recently incorporated content on developing complex applications previously developed by PwC Consulting, now IBM Business Consulting.
Open sourcing part of RUP into the open source domain is clearly a strategy for IBM to push RUP back into the center of conversation. Not surprisingly, IBM characterizes the open sourcing of RUP a bit differently. This will be a way for RUP to leverage a broader [content] ecosystem, said Mr Kroll.
