Project Artifacts

This document describes the project artifacts that currently exist or that we hope will exist in the future. The word artifact means any work product including source code, documents, diagrams, etc. Documentation for this project will be based on a methodology which we will call UP-lite. UP-lite is a very lightweight implementation of the Unified Process a generic software development methodology, best known by its proprietary implementation, the Rational Unified process. For this project the purpose of the methodology is to provide a structure for the project documentation, introducing some terminology from the Unified Process without burdening project developers or website visitors with unnecessary terminology, learning curve, or other forms of “baggage”.

There are four phases in the Unified Process that are defined below. The Unified Process uses an iterative approach to development, which typically means there are regular milestone releases. Since this project is 100% staffed with volunteers, we will not (at least initially) be scheduling milestone releases. The reason the phases are not called “Requirements”, “Design”, “Implementation”, and “Testing” is to emphasize that all of those activities occur to varying levels throughout the project. In each phase, work activities in a variety of disciplines occur that produce various artifacts.

The UP-lite project is currently in the Inception phase.

The table below presents the proposed development case for the project, which is the planned set of artifacts to be produced. Since documents are constantly being updated, the table only specifies when the artifacts are started or revised, rather than specifying when they are completed.