Unified Process

The Unified Software Development Process or Unified Process is a popular iterative and incremental software development process framework. The best-known and extensively documented refinement of the Unified Process is the Rational Unified Process (RUP). Other examples are OpenUP and Agile Unified Process.

The Unified Process is not simply a process, but rather an extensible framework which should be customized for specific organizations or projects. The Rational Unified Process is, similarly, a customizable framework. As a result, it is often impossible to say whether a refinement of the process was derived from UP or from RUP, and so the names tend to be used interchangeably.

The name Unified Process as opposed to Rational Unified Process is generally used to describe the generic process, including those elements which are common to most refinements. The Unified Process name is also used to avoid potential issues of trademark infringement since Rational Unified Process and RUP are trademarks of IBM. The first book to describe the process was titled The Unified Software Development Process () and published in 1999 by Ivar Jacobson, Grady Booch and James Rumbaugh. Since then various authors unaffiliated with Rational Software have published books and articles using the name Unified Process, whereas authors affiliated with Rational Software have favored the name Rational Unified Process.

In 2012 the Disciplined Agile Delivery framework was released, a hybrid framework that adopts and extends strategies from Unified Process, Scrum, XP, and other methods.

The Unified Process is an iterative and incremental development process. The Elaboration, Construction and Transition phases are divided into a series of timeboxed iterations. (The Inception phase may also be divided into iterations for a large project.) Each iteration results in an increment, which is a release of the system that contains added or improved functionality compared with the previous release.

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