IBM Donates Parts of Rational to Open Source

slashbob22 writes "IBM has decided to contribute portions of the Rational Unified Process to the Eclipse Foundation. From the article: 'RUP is a vast collection of methods and best practices for promoting quality and efficiency throughout software development projects. IBM's donation will also provide a foundation architecture and Web-based tools for the industry to engineer, collaborate on, share and reuse software development best practices.'"

Depends on the "Subset"

[Deinhard]

I've been a RUP user/proponent for several years. This may be, as the article alludes, a shot in the arm for improved processes. However, it remains to be seen just what the "subset" of RUP entails. RUP can be an unwieldy process that, if used in the (lowercase "e") extreme, make development slower and more "process-laden."

However, from what I've seen lately out of some shops that are using more "modern" approaches (and failing miserably) this could be welcome relief.

Re:This is VERY GOOD news

[Anonymous Coward]

You DO know that this is about the "Rational Unified Process" and NOT Rational Rose, right? RUP is the development process that Rational tries to sell you on when you sell you the Rose UML tool. If you buy into RUP, they can manage to send you tons of consultants and sell you even more costly software.

RUP is a step up from the Waterfall model, but it's certainly not the greatest thing out there.

Re:This is VERY GOOD news

[MAXOMENOS]

Actually they're part of IBM now .. and their flagship product (Rational XDE) was taken off the market by IBM for whatever reason. This move on IBM's part restores some of the functionality to the market, but not all of it. In particular the UMLcode pieces are still missing.

Not really

[fprog]

Well, maybe, but IBM Rational Rose XP is worst usability wise
then the old Rational Rose.

Also, if Rational Rose XP is a plug-in for Eclipse, but Rose is 30x the size of eclipse...
which one is really the plug-in?

And why do you need Eclipse?!
I think it was just a fast way for them to bloat up Eclipse,
and reuse existing Eclipse parts to recrate Rational Rose XP.

It crash less often than the old, but it eats way more memory.

For instance, you cannot create some non-implementation abstract specification scenario diagrams with ease, it force you to create "implementation classes", especially when you have to dupe the classes to remove some "not meaningful" associations, instead of having a "hide association" boolean config.

It also add some freaking slash: /action/(/a/,/b/)
instead of just action(a,b) for scenarios.

Some configuration settings are no more available.
Changing colors/font of some items is no more possible in some cases.

Coordinates on infinite planes are just weird...

If you prefered to have text below the use case that's no more possible,
which sometimes makes use cases diagrams looks odds
with some having large and other small ovals or having
to put a large ovals on everything just to make it similar,
reducing the amount of stuff you can fit on a page.

It force you to include association to be displayed,
even though it is "not meaningful" in the current displayed context.
Especially, if you try to create a higher abstraction view.

The cool class diagrams private/protected/public icons
are no more replaced with boring text symbols.

It force you to use some "templates" and completely ignores
"what you actually want to do". Also, it display all
unmeaningful icons on the left using a non intuitive
hide/show menu and then prohibits you to use them,
instead of having a simple toolbar like in the old
to draw your diagram and remove non-usable one.

Basically, give me back a bug-fixed Rational Rose (non-XP) app.

Re:OK OK I'll admit it -- coders are LAZY my frien

[steve_l]

yeah, unit tests kick RUPs overbloated process into the wilderness

I cannot get over the idea that OSS projects have been suffering from a lack of the RUP. We have been making do with distributed SCM, email and wiki collaboration, bugzilla, xUnit testing and plaintext artifacts. Oh, and well documented code.

Now that we have the RUP, we can stop all that and do fancy UML pictures showing how use cases are implemented instead. I am so overjoyed,.

What about purify?

[branchingfactor]

The only valuable piece of software owned by Rational is purify. Does anyone know if IBM donated purify to open source or did they keep it to themselves?

Re:What about purify?

[notwrong]

ClearCase [wikipedia.org] is pretty neat too, once you're used to it. I no longer work for the company where I used it, but there are some very nice features, eg having version control transparently part of the filesystem, actually useful branching and labelling schemes, decent merge/conflict resolution, and multi-site support. This meant we were mainly dealing with the genuine complexity in making 50 or so developers work together, rather than fighting against version control and each other.

Re:heh

[Clevershutter]

Yes. We donated the original code for Eclipse, which included features from our VisualAge family of products.

Re:This is VERY GOOD news

[kpharmer]

> RUP is in the Agile category of develpment processes

got to disagree here

RUP is heavy as hell, it's just that since XP took off at the same time the RUP folks have tried to make RUP do it all. So, sometimes they'll tell you that it can encompass agile methodologies - even though their iterations have so much overhead they really are more like waterfall phases than agile iterations.

Anhow, the way it pans out is that you typically end up with is a $100k consultant bill as well as months of work to chop all the useless artifacts out of the framework to be agile.

Then you'll still end up with mostly model-driven process with artificial roles and hand-offs. About that time you'll be seriously wondering why you left the agile path!

I think it's really a dead-end - there are quite a few folks exploring completely new methods for working together - that actually seem to work. And these methods don't look anything like RUP.

Your first answer was correct.

[sammy baby]

RUP is, in fact, a process to follow. It stands for Rational Unified Process, and defines a set of Roles, Activities, and tools used to write software. It goes into extremely exacting detail, which is, in my opinion, it's biggest weakness: unless you've memorized huge chunks of RUP, you spend a lot of your time trying to remember how to follow it. Once you have, you've spent too much time.

The activities described by RUP are supported to varying degrees by the various Rational tools: Rose for modeling, ClearCase for source control, and ClearQuest for issue tracking.