6.1 Best Practices for the Infrastructure Management Workflow

A significant difference between the Enterprise Unified Process (EUP), described by this book series, and the initial lifecycle for the Unified Process is the recognition that most organizations have more than one software project that they need to manage. The reality is that software project teams are dependent on the infrastructure of your organization and on one another from a resource sharing point of view. At the same time, within their defined scope software project teams are also independent of one another and free to make decisions in an appropriate manner. In short, for a software process to be truly effective it must include activities that support the successful management of portfolios of software projects. The Infrastructure Management workflow was specifically added to EUP to focus on the management and support of cross-project issues.

The activities of infrastructure management are summarized in Table 6.1, and, as you can see, there are a wide variety of important activities that this workflow encompasses. In this chapter we will focus on architectural issues such as security, and software process management, and support, as well as strategic reuse management and support. The other activities of this workflow were covered in The Unified Process Elaboration Phase and The Unified Process Construction Phase, Volumes 2 and 3 in this book series. During the Transition phase, and at the beginning of the Production phase as well, you are likely to perform project retrospectives (see...