[news.eclipse.technology.epf] Re: OpenUP Construction/Transition Phases

["Mark Dickson" <markjdickson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jim

Good question.

I see the two choices on offer as complementary.

We can look at Transition as a stabilisation and deliver-to-customer phase. 
It's also possible to have more than one Transition Iteration on a project 
though, as we can go round cycles of Construction / Transition (or even 
Elaboration / Construction / Transition) to introduce new features and 
release further versions of the product to the user community.

We can view the amount of ceremony required as a seperate issue, more driven 
by the needs of the specific project. I think OpenUP/Basic should tackle 
this as a low-ceremony scenario (in keeping with the general approach in 
OpenUP/Basic) and scalable through plugins.

Cheers

Mark Dickson


"Jim Ruehlin" <jruehlin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message 
news:eir2nv$acf$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 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