[news.eclipse.technology.epf] Initiate Project

["Roman Smirak" <roman.smirak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

    the Initiate project activity says that we prepare Vision and then plan 
the project based on understanding of stakeholder's needs and features of a 
system which should address the needs; the Project plan contains milestone 
per every phase and iteration. Does it mean we define the iteration 
objectives based on features and refine it later in terms of use 
cases/scenarios? (I see this scenario or transactional way of thinking or 
objectives as a prerequisite for proper iteration which should produce 
something demo-able or shippable, i.e. complete scenario from a user 
perspective). If so, can this be explicitly stated in Plan Iteration task? I 
guess this is quite important to mention since it touches the core of the 
principle..

Next issue: RUP says at several places that Inception phase should remain 
short and simple in order to avoid analysis paralysis, big requirements 
up-front or still-enough-time syndrome (and many others - e.g. you don't 
focus on right risk mitigation) - e.g. RUP (RUP Lifecycle page) says 
Inception usually takes 10 % of the schedule, or it uses term "short 
Inception" several times. I didn't find any warning or practical limit in 
OpenUP - is there any other mechanism avoiding all the anti-patterns 
mentioned above?

Substantiation: I see "Big Inception phase" anti-pattern in projects 
migrating to RUP from traditional model since they don't want to provide any 
estimates until they analyse entire domain (- which often leads to analysis 
paralysis, etc.); moreover, as they remain in Inception, they don't plan 
proper iteration as they do in Elaboration - i.e. risk driven, including 
early integration and testing, the developers continue in fragmented and 
separated work (often just reading or learning which is quite inefficient in 
many cases) - and so I'm forcing them to move to Elaboration as soon as 
possible, however, some tool or rule making this more visible or explicit 
would be great. What do you make about that? Do you have similar experience?

Thanks,

Roman