Concrete Solutions bases its software development on the Rational Unified Process (RUP) principles, as well as on the Scrum framework for project management.
Due to the impositions of a global market e of new and efficient ways of communication companies, today, are faced with unprecedented competition.
There is a need for relentless change and that new services and products are offered with increasing speed. The globalized market is unforgiving in this sense.
As consequence, software development these days demands that much more from the developers. Not only the functionality is needed, but the system must be in production quickly and capable to adapt to the changes imposed by the pace of the business.
This enormous speed and the amount of change led software development to a new frontier where changes must be faced in a painless manner and as an intrinsical part of the added value chain.
In this regard, the limitation of RUP (Rational Unified Process) of using solidified roles and responsibilities and the use of a defined process result in eternal conflict between vendors and clients.
By observing the need for fast change and the delivery of new releases in increasingly higher pace (time-to-market) Concrete felt compelled to search for a management option that embraced change in a natural fashion, avoiding the conflict and rework emanating from RUP’s management and inflexibility.
However, there are advantages in RUP that during the formation of this new work process were considered very relevant. The Unified Process brings along great knowledge in essential software engineering concepts such as architecture, design, programming, testing, deployment, etc.
With Scrum, we replaced RUP’s way of control, while maintaining it’s fundamental software concepts, combining them, thus, in a transparent manner.
We realized that there was considerable potential to generate value to our customers with the adoption of an empirical approach, seeing in Scrum the best way to manage projects and embracing change and, at the same time, recognizing RUP’s profound contribution to the software engineering practices.
Rational(tm) is considered a world leader in software development processes and tools, and was incorporated by IBM at the end of 2002.
Scrum is a project management framework based on iterative cycles and incremental delivery commonly used with agile software development.