A while ago I attended the Essential Unified Process launch at the Museum of Natural History in London, below is a fairly confusing write-up of my notes and thoughts on the matter. Please keep in mind that I am by no means and expert on this subject.

So what's it all about?

I guess you could describe the Essential Unified Process as a Framework in which you can evolve your own process. The process is defined by what’s called a process Kernel, the Kernel consists of different Practices, these practices are all “self validating” which means that in theory your able to mix and match them with your existing practices.

At the launch event Ivar Jacobsen listed 4 key innovations in EssUP that he believed gave them the right to brand this a “Next Generation Process”.

· Practice Separation

· Practice Eco-System

· Practice User Experience

· Practice Smartness

Practice Separation
This is the idea that all practices are autonomic and that they can both be used separately and implemented separately over time. This makes the process easier to adopt since you can re-use the practices you already have in place. You just define them as an EssUP practice and stick them in the process kernel.

Practice Eco-System
IJC (Ivar Jacobsen Consulting) suspects that we will see hundreds of custom practices rather than just the 8 core practices they have put in. You will see sub practices for architecture such as SOA Architecture. You will see other requirement practices such as user stores and straight up use-cases.

The idea of a practice Eco-System is that IJC provides a central repository for storing the definition for these practices. This is somewhat similar to patternshare.org. This will encourage re-use and evolution of the practices.

Practice User Experience

This appears to relate to two things. Firstly, the adoption of cards as the primary media for process definitions, artifacts, practices etc. forcing people to be concise and to the point rather than writing 500 page books about it. Ivar gave quite a nod to Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck for showing them the way on this, saying their only regret was it took them 20 years to realize they had it right all along.

Secondly are their electronic systems for managing EssUP, the team system template and their own system called project Genie. First, they said that support in team system was going to be limited to the process guidance html files. This, in my opinion, makes it as good as useless.

The demo of project genie was very unimpressive, I would go as far as to say that based on what they showed, I would rather track everything with pen and paper as much as I hate the idea.

So in summary, cards = great, their electronic alternatives = lame.

Process Smartness
This very much relates to the concept of intelligent agents. The idea is that you essentially have computer programs advising you and auto generating skeleton deliverables based on what actions your currently trying to do. I guess its a bit like intellisense for the whole of the lifecycle rather than just when your cutting your code. All in all a good idea, however I cant say I was impressed with the product they showed, in fact I cant even remember the name of it.

So what’s the Essential thing about ?
Currently EssUP consist of 8 core practices which is what’s considered “Essential”.

· Team Essentials

· Process Essentials

· Iterative Essentials

· Architecture Essentials

· Component Essentials

· Use-Case Essentials

· Model Essentials

· Product Essentials.

Sadly we weren’t told a whole lot about the individual practices, we did however get a few of the cards to play with. I’ll try and see if I can’t get a hold of a few digital copies of these and post them here.

Each practice is defined by the following elements:

· Things to produce (artifacts)

· Things to do (activities)

· Key Competencies

You might notice that testing is noticeably absent from the listed essential practices, this is because testing in EssUP cuts across all practices, you simply cannot have a practice without it validating itself. This supposedly is the key to achieving Practice Separation.

We also briefly touched on the games, which

The three games

· Development Game

· Planning Game

· Process Improvement Game

Not much were said about them other than the Planning Game didn’t really see many (if any) changes from its implementation in XP and Scrum.

For now the best (and only) place to start is the Essential Unified Process – Introduction whitepaper which can be found here : http://www.ivarjacobson.com/html/content/publication_1_1.html

Hope this didn't confuse everyone too much, as I stated above, this was mainly to try and give myself an overview of what was discussed at the launch event. If I'm wrong about any of the stuff above, by all means post a comment and let me know.

All the best

Nicolai