IBM Transitions RUP To RUP 2.0 But Is Not Quite There Yet

The Rational Unified Process (RUP) was very successful during the late 1990s and early 2000s at providing a modern set of unifying principles for organizations' software development life cycles (SDLCs). Over the past three years, Forrester has seen this popularity wane as more and more organizations have adopted Agile processes. IBM Rational continues to invest in the process framework and associated tools, making the process more Agile and integrating process into tools built on the Jazz platform. The end game is RUP 2.0, which is not a specific product but which does provide all RUP 1.0's process content within a practice-based, measurement-focused, assessment-enabled process framework with tool automation. Application development professionals who value completeness and process documentation should continue investing in RUP 1.0 and should take advantage of the Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF) where projects require more-Agile process models. Application development professionals can learn from this transformation to apply the same ideas to their existing SDLCs, moving them from stage-gate, artifact-oriented approaches to a more flexible, Agile process.