Dinosaur meets Archaeopteryx? Seven Theses on Rational's Unified Process (RUP)

This position paper summarises some critical arguments on the Rational Unified Process (RUP). In particular, claims advertising the RUP e.g. to be iterative and architecture-centric are discussed and its core concepts like phase, iteration, workflow and milestone are investigated. It is argued that their definitions and relationships to each other lack clear structure and are too complex and overloaded for practical use. Major sources of these problems are the adherence of the RUP authors to a phase-oriented process structure, their underestimation of the software architecture and of powerful structuring principles like recursion and orthogonality.