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Reviewer: George R. Mayforth

The Unified Process is a software development tool developed over thirty years that was started at Ericsson and, following a series of development steps, is now supported by Rational Software, which markets the process and a large variety of products that support it. The book provides a detailed description of the process, its benefits, and how it fits into a project management framework. The Unified Process is described as “use-case driven, architecture-centric, iterative, and incremental.” It uses the controlled iteration software development model, by which the overall project is treated as a series of iterations. A project goes through the steps of inception, elaboration, construction, and transition. Each of these phases entails five workflows: requirements, analysis, design, implementation, and testing. As the phases proceed, the workflow emphasis changes to reflect the state of the project. For example, during inception, the emphasis is on requirements and proof of concept rather than on producing finished code, whereas during construction, the requirements should be well understood and code becomes the focus. The Unified Process assumes the use of object-oriented development tools and the Unified Modeling Language (UML), a developing standard of which the authors are among the primary developers. It is assumed that readers have “a basic grasp of object-oriented concepts.” The book is targeted at “members of the development team who deal with the life-cycle activities requirements, analysis, design, implementation, and testing—that is, in work that results in UML models.” That said, UML is used minimally here, given the focus on process. The book is broken into three parts: an overview of the Unified Process, the core workflows in detail, and the four project phases in detail. Appendices provide a brief overview of UML, Unified Process extensions to the UML standard, and a glossary of terms. Overall, this book is well written and detailed. It provides well-thought-out descriptions of the elements of the Unified Process. Given the amount of detail presented, however, the notion of using the process can seem overwhelming at first (and the authors mention that the full documentation for Rational's Unified Process is more than four times the 400+ pages of this book). One should expect to read the book first for an overview, followed by a more in-depth study of the material.