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Square peg, round hole - "Agile Unified Process" WTF?

This cracked me up when I read it and I had to double check that the date wasn't April 1st!

"The first production release may take you twelve months to deliver, the second release nine months, and then other releases are delivered every six months. An early focus on deployment issues not only enables you to avoid problems it also allows you to take advantage of your experiences during development"

Priceless! Just about sums it up really. This is an almost unbelievable attempt to 'make trendy' RUP. Like traditional Project Management, people have made entire careers and businesses based around RUP and this looks like a desperate attempt to bring this type of process back into the limelight with a poor attempt at integrating "agile" into it.

Just how far do you go taking ideas and techniques from another framework, try to overlay and fit them into something like RUP before you should just quit and join the other side? Ok I agree that cross pollination of ideas is a good thing but to then call RUP "Agile" just because you borrowed a few ideas from agile frameworks is absolutely incorrect.

As XP'ers slam anyone not following all the tenants of XP so I believe to some degree that follows true for the cornerstones of any process/framwork calling itself "agile" - the chief problems I have with the "Agile Unified Process" is that it just doesn't address the feedback loop issue to allow for changes in goals, working practices and realigment with business strategy.

A great analogy Ken Schwaber made at the Scrum training course was "firing a rocket at the moon". True agile approaches allow you to tweak the course of the rocket at frequent intervals whilst in flight...traditional approaches like RUP line the rocket up at the moon on the ground and hope for the best once the blue touch paper is lit"...And so how AUP (or any process/framework) can dare call itself "agile" with a waterfall of sequential activieties and sprints lasting 12 months is beyond me!

It's great that RUP is evolving, I haven't got a problem with that - I do have a problem with it's moniker of "Agile Unified Process" - no, its RUP vNext or something like that. The nearest this gets to agile is as a relative term to RUP but using the word "Agile" in its name is totally misleading IMHO!

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