Isorupa

Copyright Rational Software 2002

http://www.therationaledge.com/content/aug_02/m_RUPSupportsISO_pk.jsp

How the Rational Unified Process Supports ISO
12207
by Philippe Kruchten
Director of Process Development
Rational Software Canada
"My organization must comply with the ISO
Standard 12207; can the RUP help me achieve this?" The short answer to this question is "Yes!" The RUP provides great support for many critical coverage areas, which I'll detail in this article.
The international standard ISO/IEC 12207:1995-- Information Technology - Software Lifecycle Processes (we'll refer to it as ISO 12207) establishes a common framework so that software practitioners can speak the same language when describing their software processes. It is not a complete, ready-to-use process, but only a framework that identifies, names, and relates various (sub)processes within the larger process domain.
The Rational Unified Process® (RUP®) is a process framework, but unlike
ISO 12207, it comes not empty, but rather prepopulated with a wealth of guidance, methods, techniques, templates, and examples, out of which a concrete process can be instantiated.1
The purpose of this article is to: q q

q

Provide a brief overview of ISO 12207.
Point to some differences between RUP and ISO 12207 terminology that may throw off the RUP practitioner (or the ISO 12207 literate).
Describe how the RUP supports various parts of ISO 12207, and identify where and to what extent it fills in blanks.2

An Overview of ISO 12207
Figure 1, which is extracted from ISO 12207,3 represents a good map of what is covered in this standard.

It shows three classes of processes: q Primary lifecycle processes (Section 5)

q

Supporting lifecycle processes (Section 6)

q

Organizational lifecycle processes (Section 7)4

These classes can be organized in views, and decomposed into activities, which are themselves decomposed in tasks. ISO 12207 stops, however, at