Not Just for Rational: Essential Unified Proces - Ivar Jacobson

A UML ‘amigo’ discusses the lighter, platform-agnostic version of RUP he is developing

By Jennifer deJong

January 15, 2006 —

Best known, along with Grady Booch and James Rumbaugh, as one of the “Three Amigos” who co-invented the Unified Modeling Language, Ivar Jacobson announced late last year that he is developing the Essential Unified Process. Recently, SD Times spoke to Jacobson about his work.

SD Times: What is the Essential Unified Process?

Ivar Jacobson: It makes use of experience and knowledge gained from RUP. But everything that is not absolutely necessary goes away. We don’t reuse any of the material. We throw away everything that is heavy.

Can you give me an example of something that is heavy?

For example, RUP includes thousands of pages [of guidance and knowledge]. But people don’t read it; it’s too much for people to think about. Essential will include no more than 200 pages. It will keep the core ideas of RUP. [A concept known as] intelligent agents will also play a role. They will deliver pages only as you need them. They work as virtual mentors.

What are the core ideas of RUP?

There are five: components; models; iterative and incremental; architecture; use cases. [RUP is based on] components and models. It is iterative and incremental, and it is architecture and use-case driven. If you focus on architecture early in the life cycle, there is less need for refactoring. When you identify use cases up-front, they give an automatic project plan.

In late November you announced plans to deliver Essential UP for Visual Studio Team System. But Essential UP isn’t designed solely for Microsoft developers, is it?

No. It is generic knowledge that can be instantiated in different platforms.

Is Jaczone [the software company Jacobson co-founded with his daughter Agneta in 2000] or any other company working on a version of Essential UP for the IBM Rational Software Development Platform?

We want to spread the core practices that will be part of Essential Unified Process as widely as possible to help the many organizations that may benefit from them. Thus, we have partnered with Microsoft to make them available to the .NET world. We have also partnered with IBM to make the part of RUP that they donate to Eclipse (called Basic UP) as successful as possible.

When do you expect to deliver the Essential UP for Visual Studio Team System?

We are targeting to release at the end of the first quarter of 2006, or the beginning of the second quarter.

Can you describe the typical architect/developer that is likely to use Essential UP?

I first have to be cautious about the word “typical.” But I would say that 50 to 60 percent of the projects that will use the Essential Unified Process could be described as typical. A typical project has a team of five to seven people and a length of six to nine months. The typical project is an application on top of a well-known platform, including middleware. However, the Essential Unified Process will be designed to also work well for new creative solutions, such as developing intelligent agents to support a banking application.?

Some members of the UML community have said the language has grown too large, noting that most architects/developers use only a few of the diagrams. Others point out that UML is solving extremely complex problems, and its broad scope is therefore necessary. Where do you stand on this issue?

I used to say that 80 percent of all projects need just 20 percent of UML. I think UML 1.1, which was designed back in 1997 by a team including Grady Brooch, Jim Rumbaugh and myself, was quite good. It needed to stabilize for several years before it went through a major redesign and extension, which happened with UML 2.0. We should have sought help from the many excellent people with background in formal language design to make sure that we had removed inconsistencies and streamlined the design. UML can model very complex software, but the more advanced features should have been separated from the 20 percent and presented in an aspect-oriented way, as we will do with the more complex extensions to Essential Unified Process. The extensions must not complicate the base.

Do you consider Essential UP an agile methodology?

Yes, absolutely. This is one of the preconditions for our work. Agile, with discipline.

Microsoft has earlier described its modeling strategy as “UML and more.” Do you agree with that characterization?

Frankly, I don’t know. However, since Microsoft can stand on top of the work done on UML, [the company] should have learned from the UML experience. I have worked with modeling languages since [the] late ’60s. Over the years, I have seen people take two different approaches. You can call it the centralized or the distributed language approach. The centralized approach was taken by SDL [Specification Description Language] and UML, a common meta-model for the whole language. The distributed approach has been taken by several larger telecommunications companies. It basically means that you have different kinds of languages for different kinds of problems. Thus, I have seen different languages for different businesses and for different disciplines, such as business modeling, requirements, architecture, testing, etc. You can call them domain specific languages—a term that was used at Ericsson back in 1990. In principle, both approaches work well, but they require rigorous, different language design practices.

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