Background of the Rational Unified Process

Background of the Rational Unified Process
The writers or developers of this software engineering process focused on diagnosing the characteristics of different software projects that failed; by doing this they tried to recognize what the common aspects were that made these software projects fail. They also looked at the existing software engineering processes and their solutions for these symptoms that caused the failure of these projects.

The symptoms are:

Ad hoc requirements management .
Ambiguous and imprecise communication
Brittle architecture
Overwhelming complexity
Undetected inconsistencies in requirements, designs, and implementations
Insufficient testing
Subjective assessment of project status
Failure to attack risks
Uncontrolled change propagation
Insufficient automation
Project failure is caused by a combination of several symptoms, though each project fails in a unique way. The outcome of their study was a system of software best practices they named the Rational Unified Process. Since knowing these problems will not guarantee a successful software product unless the solutions are also considered, they went on to create the Rational Unified Process Product (RUPP).

The Process was designed with the same techniques the team used to design software; it has an underlying object-oriented model, using Unified Modeling Language UML.