Companies Who Love Rup

We complain so much about RUP here on Wiki although I suspect there are very few of us who have used it. I figured there must be some companies out there that actually like RUP. Sure enough there are a few, according to Rational at least. On their homepage they have success stories from Lockheed Martin, Siemens, Sears, Philips and Ericsson among others.

Out of those I looked at, only Siemens and Ericsson make any mention themselves of using RUP. Ericsson appears to be in some sort of partnership with Rational and Siemens seems to make extensive use of Rational tools.

Are there any other companies we know of who a willing to admit that they use the Unified Process? Especially interesting would be popular software packages developed using RUP.

Standard Insurance Company of Portland, OR is a RUP shop. There is one "official" book that is slim, "The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction". The product (what you get when you buy a license) is a very large collection of documents, templates for many many deliverables, and process-oriented white papers. And then the Rational salesmen beat down your door to pitch the myriad pieces of the Rational suite, like Rational Rose, ClearCase, RequisitePro. It's sort of a everything-and-the-kitchen-sink thing.

You ask that as if using RUP is a shameful thing. A while back I read the RUP distilled book and I don't remember much that really jarred the sensibilities. There was a bit about RUP not needing a coach or mentor role that was a bit difficult to swallow although the claim that average developers can do miracles with XP is equally spurious. Then there was the mandatory ExponentialCostCurve to justify the whole caboodle. Apart from that the book, as I remember, was about as slim as the XP book used iterative development, promoted automated testing and version control...

I love RUP. I've used it a dozen times to create development cases over the years. Like all things, XP included, there is art to the application of any methodology. If a methodology is a checklist of what you should know and consider doing at any particular point in development, RUP is certainly that. After all XP is simply a light-weight instance of RUP. I never leave home without it. -- StevenBlack

The opinions of the programmers in these large companies may differ from the official one.

It is not really surprising that RUP is used at Ericsson and Siemens. RUP has its roots in the telecom industry and there all things are traditionally heavyweight. That doesn't mean it will always be so. This is a time of change for the telecoms if ever there was one. Who knows what might happen to these large companies and what this will mean for RUP.