[News] IBM donated the RUP to eclipse

From http://www.umlchina.com/News/Content/221.htm

IBM and many other companies jointly propose to share the common practices and methods for software development on the basis of open-source eclipse.

Per Kroll, a manager of IBM Rational, said that IBM contributed a subset of its product Rational Unified Process (RUP) to create a new pipeline process called the eclipse process framework. RUP is a cutting-edge framework used to manage software development projects. Kroll estimates that the contribution of this time accounts for 15% of the RUP.

15 other companies also decided to contribute code and processes to the framework, including Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, covansys, number six software, Armstrong process group, object mentor, and bedarra research labs.

Kroll pointed out that the more predictive methodologies provided for software development projects will help developers build more trusted applications with higher efficiency and lower costs.

According to IBM, nearly half of internal software development projects have exceeded the expected cost, with 90% completed after the preset deadline and 30% canceled. Moreover, according to Standish Group, 15% to 20% of software bugs cost US $60 billion a year.

"The rate of failed projects in the industry is too high," Kroll said ".

Chris Armstrong, president of Armstrong process group, compared the software development status with the manufacturing status in the 20th century. He believes that as soon as the manufacturing industry has a common practice that can be reused in the entire industry, productivity has been magically improved.

Armstrong firmly believes that the same improvement can happen in the software industry, if we have a common methodology covering various complex steps of software development.

"For me, this represents an important step towards maturity in this industry," he believes. "The most stable and predictable process is the software development process, we will do better on this ".

Eclipse process framework is cross-platform, which means developers can use it in Java and Microsoft. NET development environments to build applications.

However, Armstrong pointed out that users on. NET are not expected to use the eclipse process framework, because Microsoft has its own software development methodology and Best Practices named Microsoft Solutions framework (MSF ).

However, Microsoft's framework does not support many other development platforms. One example, Armstrong said, Is that Microsoft has its own software development process meta-model, rather than using OMG's Software Process Engineering metamodel (spem), which is an industry standard for software development.

However, Microsoft believes that MSF is built on the simplified spem and is consistent with the OMG metadata model.

A Microsoft female spokesman said in the statement that Microsoft intends to improve MSF and provide two process templates for Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 team system respectively.

The spokesman pointed out that MSF for Agile Software Development has enhanced risk management, release management, design for operations, and other features in iterative software development. MSF for cmme (Capability Maturity Model Integration) provides links to the cmme process so that software organizations can quickly apply mature software development practices to drive business capabilities.

Microsoft plans to release a new version of Visual Studio November 7 in San Francisco in 2005.

It takes one to two months for the eclipse Committee members to review the proposal on the eclipse process framework. Kroll points out that they will then vote to decide whether to adopt it.