SoftElegance's Blog

Yes there is, but XP’s “activities” are not formally identified or described. you’ll find it headed “Define requirements with stories, written on cards” and then throughout the chapter is a mixture of process description and guidance about what use stories are and how (and by whom) they should be produced. And so it goes on, as the books describe XP under major headings; “things done” and “things produced” are described with varying degrees of prescription and detail. RUP’s apparent prescription comes from its completeness and greater formality in its systematic treatment of activities, and their inputs and outputs. XP does not lack prescription, but perhaps in the attempt to remain “lightweight”, the formality and detail are simply omitted. The detail that is present in RUP will have to be added when XP is implemented on a project. Lack of specificity is not a strength or a weakness, but you should not confuse the lack of detailed information in XP with simplicity. At some point, the people on the project will need to know what to do and at that time will need the detail.
Continue reading

One reason is that XP doesn’t have the scope of RUP. This is quite intentional: XP is about programming to meet a business need. How that business need occurred and how it’s modeled, captured, and reasoned about is not XP’s main concern. The XP team member who is the customer presents the distillation of requirements as stories to the XP development team;
they are also the arbiters of business value. The magic of how the stories came to be expressed (or expressible) in that form is not the concern of XP. So, for example, what RUP describes in its Business Modeling discipline is outside the scope of XP (Business Modeling in RUP has ~14 artifacts). XP describes a process that has regular releases to the customer. The logistics of deployment of these releases are not the concern of development,
so the RUP Deployment discipline is largely outside the scope of XP (Deployment in RUP has ~9 artifacts). Therefore, for a small project amenable to XP, you would expect to omit ~23 artifacts when tailoring RUP.

Continue reading