Abstract
Software organizations looking to adopt an iterative and incremental process have found themselves left with less than ideal options. While RUP, the IBM Rational Unified Process®, was the first mainstream iterative software process, its complexity and size makes it difficult to adopt. Agile processes like Scrum and XP, on the other hand, are leaner, but their different culture and lack of documentation often meet resistance from management.
This dilemma is perfect soil for the new OpenUP process which packages the best RUP and agile practices in a light-weight open source process framework. The result makes management happy, since they get a stable and well-defined governance process, is easy to adopt, and serves the team a smorgasbord of software best practices right in their web browsers.
This article gives an overview of OpenUP and explains how it relates to both RUP, from which it received its foundation, and agile methods, from which it incorporates their best practices.