What should the state of the software be at the end of the OpenUP
Construction phase? This is currently a gray area in OpenUP. There are a
couple of different schools of thought:
* The software should be code complete, with the possible exception
of some trivial stuff that doesn't affect the beta version. In
this scenario, Transition is used to stabilize and deploy the
complete system (including training, documentation, etc).
* The software should be stable, but there can still be features to
implement. In this scenario, Transition is a way to get usable
software incrementally delivered to the customer. One place this
might be particularly useful is in lower ceremony organizations
where there's little overhead required to deploy.
An observation is that OpenUP encourages getting stable functionality
out to customers. This could just be a demo, but it could also be a
partial working system that the customer is using. If this is the case,
what's the difference between Construction and Transition? Do we
restrict deployment to Transition and declare that Construction should
only show functionality ("look but don't touch")? Or maybe Transition
can be just like Construction except that we include tasks in Transition
like writing the end-user documentation and creating training materials.
If this is the case, we need to define a milestone for Construction that
allows us to objectively measure progress.
Does anyone have any preferences or other insights?
Jim Ruehlin
jruehlin@xxxxxxxxxx