As one of the fathers of the Rational Unified Process lifecycle, Ivar Jacobson has created this agile, scalable practice allows you to control and track software development projects from end to end, through each iterative development step. It gives your software team the ability to:
- Establish the project lifecycle
- Share milestones with other projects and teams
- Identify short-term objectives to reduce levels of risk
- Structure project plans into well-understood phases
- Leverage the benefits of iterative development
This software practice contains a set of effective lifecycle patterns, that, when applied on the project, help the software development team to:
- Understand where the project is, and how well they are doing in addressing the risks.
- Adopt a standard control framework to guide them in establishing appropriate objectives and milestones.
- Iterate in a controlled manner.
- Balance the evolution of their architecture and requirements alongside the development of a high quality software solution.
This pattern defines a set of milestones, or way points, suitable for the planning and tracking of all styles of iterative and incremental software development projects. The pattern describes these three milestones for each product release cycle as follows:
- Lifecycle Objectives (LCO) – key decisions are made for what will and will not be in the product release. The operational requirements of the software are agreed.
- Lifecycle Architecture (LCA) – the software architecture is established and major associated risks are resolved.
- Initial Operational Capability (IOC) – the software is fully functional and preparations are made for transitioning the software to the customer and/or the live operating environment.