APPLYING SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT METHODS IN PRACTICE - The RUP example

System development methods have already long been controversially discussed, but there is still a lack of knowledge and understanding based on empirical studies about how systems development is actually conducted in practice, how system development methodologies and methods are used and to what degree they are used as proposed in the literature (Floyd, 1986; Nandhakumar & Avison, 1999). The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this understanding. It reports how and to what degree Rational's Unified Process (RUP) was used in two commercial development projects. RUP is considered a state-of-the-art, object-oriented methodology with a focus on iterative and incremental development features and has been promoted as a solution to problematic issues in systems development such as unfinished projects, budget and time overruns, erroneous systems and systems with lacking functionality (Boehm, 1988; Jacobsen et al., 1999). This paper presents an empirical case study in a consultancy firm. The case study is based on interviews with experienced project managers and systems developers, who participated in the two projects. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 introduces the background and related work of the study. Section 3 introduces the conceptual framework, which is used to analyze the empirical findings from the case study. In section 4 RUP is explained and section 5 describes the research approach, which has been used for data