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development and management of the process and covers the entire software life cycle. The
RUP is very well documented in topics and companion papers, and is supported by a web-
based knowledge base that provides all team members with guidelines, templates and tool
mentors for all development activities. Many training and consultancy opportunities are
available. A family of tools, produced by IBM Rational Company, is available to support
the process.
The key concept of RUP is the defi nition of activities (workfl ow) throughout the
development life cycle, such as requirement elicitation, analysis, design, implementation,
and testing. Unlike the classical waterfall process, these activities can be overlapped and
performed in parallel. Within each of the activities, there are well-defi ned stages of incep-
tion, elaboration, construction, and transition. While they occur in sequence, there may be
iterations between them until a project is complete. During the design of the solution, the
CBD support is encouraged, but it is rather declarative and implicit. RUP promotes CBD
through the use of UML and it is heavily infl uenced by UML notations and its design ap-
proach. UML takes more of an implementation and deployment perspective on components
through component and deployment diagrams. Therefore, RUP's view on the component
concept is still at the level of physical packaging. This is illustrated by RUP's defi nition of a
component as “a non-trivial, nearly independent, and replaceable part of a system that fulfi ls
a clear function in the context of a well-defi ned architecture. A component conforms to,
and provides the physical realization of a set of interfaces.” RUP suggests the use of UML
subsystems for modeling components without detailed explanation. It is obvious that RUP
is not specifi cally focused on component-based development. It offers a general framework
for object-oriented design and construction that can be used as the basis for other methods.
Using the UML as the basic modeling notation provides a great deal of fl exibility in system
design, but specifi c support for key component modeling concepts is lacking and limited to
the UML notation. In the light of current improvements of the UML towards the new version
2.0, RUP may adapt more complete and consistent CBD mechanisms and principles. One of
the main advantages of RUP is that it provides an opportunity for iterative and incremental
system development, which is seen as the best development practice.
Select Perspective
The Select Perspective method (Allen & Frost, 1998; Apperly et al., 2003) was created
by combining Object Modeling Technique (OMT) (Rumbaugh, Blaha, Premerlani, Eddy &
Lorenson, 1991) and Use Case driven Objectory method (Jacobson et al., 1992). After the
standardization of UML as an object-oriented modeling language, the method adopted the
UML notation. The fi rst version of Select Perspective comprised the activities of business
modeling, use case modeling, class modeling, object interaction modeling and state modeling.
With the growing interest in CBD, Select Perspective was extended with activities related
to different aspects of components—business-oriented component modeling, component
modeling of legacy assets, and deployment modeling (Allen & Frost, 1998). The latest
version of Select Perspective published recently (Apperly, 2003) provides more compre-
hensive and sophisticated support for component-based and service-oriented development.
The method is well documented in the available topics, companion papers, and technical
reports. Training and consultancy support are available. A family of component-based tools
includes Component Factory, Component Architect, Component Manager, code generations,
etc. that effectively support the various aspects of the method.
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