The Basis Of the Process
At the heart of EssUP are a number of simple and proven practices that can be used as the foundation for all styles and scale of software development. These practices have all been designed so that they can be adopted individually or in any combination you desire. This makes the process easy to adopt and enables it to provide a foundation for the creation and assembly of a process that truly meets your needs, the needs of developers, and the needs of your development organization.
EssUP comes with five foundation practices and three work practices to ease the introduction of the process into your organization. The five foundation practices address technical development work. To complement the technical foundation provided by the development practices, three other practices promote effective team work and process improvement.
Test is everywhere. We believe in the saying "Whatever you do, you are not done until you have verified that you did what you wanted to do," or "Everyone is his own cleaner." We make test an integral part of everything we do. Use-Case Essentials include test-driven design because use cases are early test cases. Component Essentials include unit testing of components.
This set of practices provides you with the foundation to take an agile approach to process planning and implementation. You can adopt all the practices, just the practices you need, an individual practice, or even a partial practice. You can mix and match the practices to meet your needs, write your own practices to extend the process, and mix in your own existing practices to build on your own experiences. This is a significant difference to traditional processes, which are developed with all their practices tightly intertwined.
