RUP & UML
Peter Komisar © Conestoga College  version 1.0  Fall / 2007

Reference:  Third Draft Document for Review, Sept. 17,2007,
SG24-7501-00 'Rational Application Developer V7 Programming
Guide'.
This is a synopsis of information found in the first part of the sixth
chapter, ''RUP & UML'  found in the third draft Document for Review,
dated September 17, SG24-7501-00 Rational Application Developer
V7 Programming Guide. It has been prepared for private academic
purposes and is not an effort to publish the contained material.

Any anonymous quotes are from the above noted reference.

 Overview

Rational is famous for it's design software, both for
providing a organized procedure for developing
software for a large organization and for visual
modeling constructs useful for designing and creating 
software.  These two development frameworks are
called in abbreviation, RUP and UML.

RUP

RUP is the 'Rational Unified Process'. It provides
a practical framework with which provides a guideline
useful to keeping company representives, project
managers and archtitects communicating clearly
and with mutual understanding as to what they are
trying to achieve and how they are going to get there.

It has been shown that a great deal of failure of company
software projects comes from failures to specify and
mutually understand requirements.


RUP has a number of process pieces or building blocks
that are used to guide development. They describe in
a step by step fashion what needs to be produced.

Rational Software Delivery Platform

"The Rational Process Advisor is a feature provided by the
Rational Software Delivery Platform that integrates the RUP
seamlessly within the development environment."

RUP seeks to replace a lot of paper documentation with
working software. It  leverages the Unified Modelling
Language (UML) to do this.

UML

UML is an industry standard language used to describe
and communicate requirements, architectures and designs.
UML can be leveraged to visually develop Java Enterprise
components and Web services applications.

"Rational Application Developer provides a customizable
UML 2.1 based modelling tool that integrates tightly in the
development environment. This tool is the focus in the
second part of this chapter."


The Rational Universal Process

RUP uses takes process descriptions and progressively
refines them into more detailed process descriptions.

The Rational Unified Process combines six best practices
into a "cohesive and well documented process description:"


RUP Six Best Practices

The following image from the IBM Redbook RAD 7
Programmer's Guide summarizes the RUP process.

Phases & Iterations

"The horizontal axis represents the dynamic structure
and shows the life cycle aspects of a process as time
goes by. It is described in terms of phases and iterations."


Individual Disciplines

The vertical axis represents the static structure and
content respectively. It shows the individual disciplines,
which logically group the process content.

Overview of the Rational Unified Process
// image from the IBM Redbook RAD 7 // Programmer's Guide

IBM RUP Process


"RUP divides the life cycle of a project in one or more
individual cycles that focus on the generation of
successive releases of a system (for example, version 1.0
and version 1.1). "

Each cycle consists of four successive phases:

Life Cycle Four Phases


Project Milestones

Each of these phases has a special meaning and
concludes with a well defined project milestone.

A phase itself further breaks down in several
individual iterations, each producing some kind
of working software.

Static Content

The static content of the process describes the
'individual artifacts' to be produced:

1. the artifacts themselves
- their characteristics
-standards they will conform to

2. the different roles
- including required skills
- responsibilities within a project
- tasks providing step-by-step explanations
 on how specific development goals are to be achieved.

"Related tasks and responsibilities are grouped together
and categorized by disciplines. . .  Every discipline defines
a standard way or workflow of doing the work it categorizes."


Beyond supplying a process framework to structure a
software development process,  RUP provides the
following:

"Rational Application Developer facilitates the use
of the Rational Unified Process by the Process Advisor
feature. This feature provides a seamless integration of
a development process within a development tool. It
enables the development team to work with a common
development process that is configured for a practitioner’s
specific environment."


The Process Advisor

It is via the 'Process Advisor' that the guidance, templates
and tool mentors mentioned above are accessed.

The Process Advisor also allows browsing process views
and managing preferences from within the developer's own
IDE.

To Use the Process Advisor

The Process Advisor consists of the four elements:
// see accompanying pdf screenshots


Process Advisor Components
UML in RAD 7

RAD 7 provides UML visual editing support. This is a
form of visual build tool that simplifies the development
of complex applications.

The tool allows creation and modification of Java classes
and interfaces visually, using Class diagrams. The structure
of an application can be viewed in terms of the relationships
between various Java elements. Changes can be made
without having to flip between the model and  code.

// "Unlike the diagrams offered in Rational Software Modeler
// or Rational Software Architect, these are visualizations only
// of actual code. Any changes to the diagrams directly affect the
// underlying code. So, true UML 2.1 modelling is not possible
// using Rational Application Developer. The UML 2.1 notation
// is used in these diagrams as a way to visualize and understand
// the code."


Visual Editing

Visual editing allows the development to proceed without
explicitly typing code into a text editor. Components, such
as Java classes are dragged and dropped from a palette
onto a diagram. Further editing can proceed by adding
methods and attributes or defining relations between them.

RAD 7 offers the following types of UML visual diagrams:


RAD 7 UML Visual Diagrams

The tools are not Java specific and can work with
XML in creating Web Services.

// see pdf for diagram of a typical work space setup


Unified Modeling Language

RUP is largely based on models.

"A model - is a description of a system from a particular
perspective, omitting irrelevant details so that the
characteristics of interest are seen more clearly."

Models are useful for
Modeling promotes
UML is a standardized language for modelling different
aspects of an application.

UML can be used to:
 // a UML favorite word, 'artifact'  -'anything made
// by human work or art' - webster's dictionary
 

The language uses three kinds of building blocks:
Things

Things are the basic elements of a model.

The UML defines four kinds of things:

Relationships

UML defines five kinds of relationships describing
how element are related:

Diagrams

"A diagram -is a graphical presentation of a set of
elements, most often rendered as a connected graph
of things and their relationships."

UML provides thirteen types of diagrams allowing
capturing, communicating and documenting all aspects
of an application in a standard graphical notation.

The diagrams are categorized into three groups: