Solutions

Rational Unified Process (RUP)

Brinex employs the foundation of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) as our approach toward a System Development Life Cycle (SDLC). It provides a disciplined approach to assigning tasks and responsibilities within a development organization. The goal of RUP is to ensure the production of high-quality software that meets the needs of its end-users, within a predictable schedule and budget. The following are the phases identified in RUP:

Inception - Define the scope of the poject.
Elaboration - Define the requirements and architecture.
Construction - Develop the solution.
Transistion - Deploy the solution.

Each phase is concluded with a well-defined milestone — a point in time at which certain critical decisions must be made, and therefore key goals must have been achieved.

Inception Phase

The inception phase establishes the business case for the system and delimits the project scope. This phase identifies of all external entities with which the system will interact (actors) and defines the nature of this interaction at a high-level. The next step (if applicable) involves identifying all use cases and describing a few significant ones.

Milestone : Lifecycle Objectives

Elaboration Phase

The purpose of the elaboration phase is to analyze the problem domain, establish a sound architectural foundation,develop the project plan, and eliminate the highest risk elements of the project.

The elaboration phase is the most critical of the four phases. At the end of this phase, the hard "engineering" is considered complete and the project undergoes its most important day of reckoning: the decision onwhether or not to commit to the construction and transition phases.

In the elaboration phase, an executable architecture prototype is built in one or more iterations, depending on the scope, size, risk, and novelty of the project. This effort should at least address the critical use cases identified in the inception phase, which typically expose the major technical risks of the project.

Milestone : Lifecycle Architecture

Construction Phase

During the construction phase, all remaining components and application features are developed and integrated into the product, and all features are thoroughly tested.

Milestone : Initial Operational Capability

Transition Phase

The transition phase focuses on the activities required to place the software into the hands of the users. Typically, this phase includes several iterations, including beta releases, general availability releases, as well as bug-fix andenhancement releases. This phase can range from being very simple to extremely complex, depending on the type of product.

The transition phase is entered when a baseline is mature enough to be deployed in the end-user domain

Milestone: Product Release

The following graph demonstrates for each discipline a rough estimate of the relative effort for each throughout the four phases:

Reference:
Manager's Introduction to the RUP
http://www.ambysoft.com/unifiedprocess/rupIntroduction.html