The Unified Process Inception Phase describes strategies for successfully initiating a software development team.

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

• To describe the initial requirements
• To develop and justify the business case for the system
• To determine the scope of your system
• To identify the people, organizations, and external systems that will interact with your system
• To develop an initial risk assessment, schedule, and estimate for your system
• To develop an initial tailoring of the Unified Process to meet your exact needs

This book collects articles written by industry luminaries that describe practices in these areas. One goal of this book and of the entire series, is to provide proven alternative approaches to the techniques encompassed by the Rational Unified Process (RUP). Another goal is to fill in some of the gaps in the Unified Process. Because the Unified Process is a development process, not a software process, it inevitably misses or shortchanges some of the concepts that are most important for software professionals. 

This book is first in a four-volume series that presents a critical review of the Unified Process – designed to present a more robust software process that addresses your development and production needs. The series provides a balanced perspective of the alternative design methodologies available, proposes a synthesized software process that addresses the scope of your real world, and presents materials from the Software Development magazine that will flesh out each of the UP phases. In this series you get the collective wisdom of industry luminaries such as Karl Wiegers, Jim Highsmith, Ellen Gottessdiener, Lucy Lockwood, Warren Keuffel, Larry Constantine, and myself (Scott Ambler).