Helpful RUP

From RUP, I used the “Vision document” and the “Risk list” and it felt like a great help!

Do you remember RUP, the Rational Unified Process? Have you heard how frowned upon it is nowadays? People joke about using it and tell horror stories from RUP projects. Probably the same way you’ll hear horror stories from failed SCRUM projects in the future.

I never used RUP for more than a school project but there were two things with it that I really liked and I felt a need for those today.

I’m planning a course in Agile Testing which I will be holding in February this year*. It was hard to get started, the usual “Where to start?”-paralysis. Realizing that I needed to keep my goal in mind to do a successfull course and that there were a lot things that scared me about this, I pulled up two classic artifacts.

The vision document (written on an index card) for my course is “The participant should feel the inspiration and the courage to work with quality together with the team”. After writing it down I reflected a bit on what is inspiring and what inspires courage. I need to keep this is mind when putting together the topics and exercises we’ll do.

My risk list (which also fits on an index card) includes five items like “too abstract”, “not enough time”, etc and each item has an action that I can do to mitigate the risk.

Having produced these artifacts feels good because I now have a plan to deal with my fears and I have my vision written down which will help me stay on track. When asked the question “will your course include X?” I can think of my vision and decide wether it is relevant to fulfill the vision or not.

So don’t be affraid to pick techniques from different places. Even from RUP 🙂
* This is part of an innovation program that we have at Citerus. Anyone can spend a few work hours preparing a pitch for an idea they would like to develop. I got to see my idea through which meant more available hours to get to try something new.