Compare Essential Unified Process (EssUP) with Rational Unified Process (RUP)

Essential Unified Process (EssUP) is a new software development process invented by Ivar Jacobson around 2006. It is based on Rational Unified Process (RUP) and takes Agile development philosophy into account. RUP was proposed by IBM Rational and now it is implemented as part of the IBM Rational tools. It is well known that EssUP is practice separation and lightweight and UP is an integrated and heavyweight process. In this paper, we introduce and characterize EssUP by systematically comparing it with traditional RUP from different aspects such as separation of concerns, flexibility, presentation, and tailorable. Comparison results show that EssUP is very flexible to be adopted, adapted, and configured. In other words, there is no actual process for EssUP and EssUP is just composed of a set of selected practices. Moreover, to successfully apply EssUP requires experiences and expertise. The contribution of the paper is that we provide readers a comprehensive and insight view of EssUP by thoroughly comparing it with commonly-used RUP.