The Essential Unified Process (EssUP) is a collection of practices that together form the essential knowledge of a complete software development lifecycle. This practice-centric approach to software development incorporates and builds on established best practices. The practices in EssUP integrate successful principles from the unified process, agile and process maturity camps, capitalizing on their different capabilities: structure, agility and process improvement.
Separating the concerns
The practices at the heart of EssUP have been developed with a new and innovative approach based on aspect-oriented thinking. By helping identify and address specific concerns in order of priority, EssUP focuses your approach and makes it easier to tailor your way of working to the needs of your organization or project.
An agile expert’s view
In the introduction to his article, “The Essential Unified Process (EssUP) - New Life for the Unified Process,” agile expert Dave Thomas writes: ”…EssUP provides a fresh approach to software process improvement. …The Essential Unified Process is much simpler, and much more flexible and extensible than previous expressions of UP. It is presented with a lightweight and friendly approach which makes learning the process easy, some might say even agile. Although the Essential Unified Process is a dramatic improvement to UP, the ideas underlying it are very useful to describe basically any process. The approach is practice-centric instead of process-role centered.”