Thursday, June 16, 2005

The Rational Unified Process and Test Driven Development

Since I have spent most of this week in RUP training, presented by the Ivar Jacobson International company, I was reading a blog from Mike Bosch concerning the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and Extreme Proramming (XP).

I agree with Mike concerning "Unless you have a LOT of authority you will find it very exhausting to try and influence a culture change without buy-in from your management." I work at a large financial institution which whole heartedly supports RUP. In addition to having one of the "three amigos" own consulting company contracted to provide detailed courses on the four phases of RUP and their various disciplines, Dr. Jacobson has often provided great lectures to the application development teams that are broadcast to the various corporate team locations within the United States. In my view that is great. However any corresponding and/or competing methodology is typically viewed with skepticism and then ignored.

I have found that within the corporate environment I have been able to introduce Test Driven Development as a programming methodology that our dev team can use internally. In fact I am finding that it is a relatively easy sale because TDD is so effective concerning both the quality of code and efficiency of the team production! Moreover, the artifact of the tests is a great source of "developer oriented documentation" for new team members that are already familiar with developer testing tools such as JUnit or NUnit.

All in all, RUP is a tried and tested methodology for an organization as large as the one that I am currently employed. Yet, it is greatly enhanced by agile processes.

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