Research On The Object-Oriented Software Process

Currently, the main feature of the software development is with larger scale and higher complexity. Software engineering needs to be advanced to meet the general demand. Therefore, experts in the software engineering area search for new software development methods and software processes to satisfy the public requirement, and some progress has been made. At present, the object-oriented method is the main development technique. In the software process area, RUP of Rational Corporation is the dominant process. In addition, OPEN and OOSP are two other software processes.In the middle of 1980' s, it was the age of the software development and production focused on process in the U. S. Some popular and important international standards have been released, such as the Capability Maturity Model presented by the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, ISO/IEC 15504 software process assessment standard released by the ISO. The two software process standards are analyzed and compared with each other in this paper. And the relationship between the software life cycle process and the software process is explained.Three leading object-oriented software processes are RUP, OPEN and OOSP. RUP is the process product of Rational Corporation, OPEN is presented by OPEN Institute, and OOSP is presented by Scott W. Ambler. The three processes are analyzed and compared with each other in this paper. According to the result of the assessment on RUP by ISO/IEC 15504 and the comparison with OPEN and OOSP, RUP is only a development process. It does not include the complete software life cycle process and lack the processes about the maintenance, operation and support, process improvement etc. Therefore, RUP needs to be enhanced through taking advantages of OPEN and OOSP and referencing the softwareprocess standards. The solution is to add two phases and two workflows to the original life cycle model of RUP. The two phases are production phase and retirement phase, and the two workflows are operation & support workflow and enterprise management workflow. The enhanced RUP will be a complete software process that is called EUP. A solution about how an organization develops software with EUP is presented in the paper. It indicates that the organization should treat adopting EUP as a project. After the inception phase, the elaboration phase, the construction phase, the transition phase and the production phase, the organization will own a process based on EUP.