Introduction

The purpose of the Environment workflow is to configure the processes, tools, standards, and guidelines to be used by your project team. As you see in Figure 6.1, which depicts the enhanced lifecycle of the Unified Process, most Environment workflow effort occurs during the Inception and Elaboration phases. The Environment workflow encompasses several major efforts, including the tailoring of your organization's software process to meet the unique needs of your project, choosing the standards and guidelines that your project team will follow, and selecting the tools that your team will use.

Figure 6.1: The enhanced lifecycle for the Unified Process.

What are some of the best practices that your project team can adopt with regards to the Environment workflow? First, recognize that you do not need to reinvent the environment wheel. Look for existing tools, standards, and guidelines within your organization, or better yet, within the industry. Your job is to develop software, not to develop infrastructure. Second, let common standards drive your tool selection. A common mistake is to choose tools first and then get stuck with their proprietary approach to development. If you want your destiny to be defined by your tool vendor, that's your business; we'd rather determine what we want to do and then find tools that best match our vision. Therefore, you should choose your modeling standards before selecting a CASE tool and set your user interface design guidelines before picking a development tool that supports them. Third, define your environment early...