The Unified Process Transition and Production Phases

The Unified Process Transition and Production Phases presents a robust software process that addresses your deployment and production needs. 

The Transition phase is the fourth of six phases — Inception, Elaboration, Construction, Transition, Production , and Retirement — that a system experiences throughout its complete lifecycle. During the Transition phase your team will focus on testing and validating your complete system, operating the system in parallel with any legacy systems that you are replacing (if applicable), converting legacy databases and systems to support your new release, training the customers of your system, and deploying your system into production. As you perform these activities you will create and/or evolve a wide variety of artifacts:

  • Final product baseline (also known as a production baseline) of your system
  • Training materials for your system
  • Documentation, including user manuals, support documentation, and operations documentation

The phase is concluded with the Product Release milestone. To pass this milestone you must show that your users are satisfied with the system and that show that the actual expenditures versus the planned expenditures are still acceptable.

The Production phase is the fifth of six phases — Inception, Elaboration, Construction, Transition, Production , and Retirement — that a release of software experiences throughout its complete lifecycle. During the Production phase you will focus on operating your system and supporting your users working with it. This includes monitoring the system and acting appropriately to ensure continued operation; operating and maintaining relevant jobs, logs, and supporting systems; responding to help requests, error reports, and feature requests by users; and managing your change control process so that defects and new features may be prioritized and assigned to future releases. As you perform these activities you will create and/or evolve a wide variety of artifacts:

  • Software problem reports summarizing potential defects or new features for future releases
  • Problem resolution strategies to be followed by users requiring support
  • Appropriate metrics summarizing system usage, system performance, and user satisfaction

The Production phase is concluded with the Product Retirement Objectives milestone. To pass this milestone you must achieve one of:

  • A new version of the system is deployed into production
  • The system is replaced by a new one
  • The system is removed completely from production, an event called retirement or sunsetting
  • Your organization ceases operation

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.