Although I am trained in the Rational Unified Process, the more I read about Scrum the more I like it. To me it just makes sense. I have yet to apply it to a project, but I think I will try and do this for my next consulting or development project.
I like the idea of 2 to 4 week software development “sprints” to get software that is fully functional out the door, and then do it all over again. I think it keeps developers excited and engaged and communicating. Then customers can see what has been done and suggest changes then and there and you can put the changes in with the next sprint. This seems very agile to me and makes sense. To often customers think they want a certain feature, UI or whatever and then they use it and decide that they really needed something else. These sprints manage risk because you don’t get into development and 6 months later show the customer something that fits their requirements, but isn’t really what they needed at all!
My main problem with RUP is that in my experience too often it takes the developers out of the process and there are tons of documents but no communication. I will say that the places I have worked did not have a resident RUP person and to often it felt like a waterfall aproach with some RUP documents sprinkled in! I do love use cases though, and for communicating with the non technical, these can’t be beat.
Maybe a version of RUP mixed with a version of SCRUM would be nice. You gather requirements, create use cases, decide on milestones, hit a sprint and then do it all over again, adding changes to the next sprint.
