The Unified Process Elaboration Phase focuses on effective practices for defining, validating, and establishing the baseline architecture for a system.

This book contains a carefully selected array of articles address the vital elements of this phase. Subjects include developing frameworks, component architectures, designing with interfaces, building large systems, using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) effectively, working with legacy systems, modeling business rules, selecting tools, building your development team, user interface prototyping, testing your requirements, and effectively managing metrics.

The Elaboration phase is the second of six phases – Inception, Elaboration, Construction, Transition, Production , and Retirement – that a system experiences throughout its complete lifecycle. This phase has several goals:

• To produce a proven, architectural baseline for your system
• To evolve your requirements model to the “80% completion point”
• To develop a coarse-grained project plan for the entire Construction phase
• To ensure that the critical tools, processes, standards, and guidelines have been put in place for the Construction phase
• To understand and eliminate the high-priority risks of your project

This book presents a collection of articles written by industry luminaries that describe leading-edge practices. One goal of this book, and of this series in general, is to provide alternate, proven approaches to the techniques encompassed by the Unified Process. Another goal is to fill the gaps of the Unified Process – to be fair no process can ever truly be considered complete. The Unified Process is a development process, not a software process, therefore just because of its chosen scope it’s going to be missing important concepts for most software professionals. Luckily the writers appearing in Software Development have taken a much broader view of process scope.