One RUP to Rule Them All, and in Darkness Bind Them
I have a confession. I looove gadgets. With many knobs and blinking lights and cool stuff. Stuff like Blinkenlights makes me quite excited. When I was young, I used to play with hours with math. I invented the hyperparabola, which was my own term for a formula that combined a hyperbolic function and a parabolic function. I could make a neat curve based on the formula.
Opening Rational’s RUP tool gives me the same feeling. It has so many cool artifacts and roles and work processes and all this stuff. You could get lost for hours in the documentation just following links and reading process descriptions and artifact templates and workflows. There are cool activity diagrams showing you that “in order to implement an operation on a component, you: choose an algorithm, choose data structures appropriate to the algorithms, define new classes and operations as necessary, and Code the operation”. What wonderful non-sense. Trivial if you know it already, dangerous if you don’t. There tons and tons of this stuff!
When I showed my hyperparabolic function to my teacher, he asked me what it was for. I didn’t have a good answer to him. It was basic mental mastrubation. Playing with ideas for the sake of playing with ideas. I wonder how much of RUP is the same.