Plunk! A book lands with a thud on my desk. "Hmm ... What's this?" I ask. "It's your training manual." says my boss. "Rational Unified Process? Interesting." I spend the next week pouring through the book trying to learn the correct way to build software. The "4+1" model was part of the documentation that I was asked to read.
I learned some things and ignored some things. I figured out early on that Rational Rose and Visual C++ were enemies. I also found out that as a consultant we were rarely called in to develop projects from the ground up. Usually we were called in to help out on the Messy Metropolis type projects of the world. Going back and creating documentation for an existing product (that had none) was rarely something that clients wanted to pay us for.
In all honestly, I like the "4+1" model. I think it is flexible and can be easily adapted to the type and size of the project being worked on. Clients appear to like it as well and seem to be able to understand the documentation that we produce. The fact that I have continued to use a loose variation of the model for the last ten years should be worth something. Right?
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