Artifact: Project Specific Guidelines

	Project-Specific Guidelines provides prescriptive guidance on how to perform a certain activity or a set of activities in the context of the project. The guidelines selected for the project are seen as a part of the development process for this project, also known as the Project-Specific Process.
Other Relationships:	Part Of Development Process
Role:	Process Engineer
Optionality/Occurrence:	Which guidelines to provide is based on the project's specific needs and availability. Guidelines are recommended for consistency and help, but they are usually not part of any project delivery and as such are optional.
Templates and Reports:	Template: Business Modeling Guidelines Template: Use-Case Modeling Guidelines Template: Design Guidelines Template: Programming Guidelines Template: Test Guidelines
Examples:	CSPS Design Comps - Inception Phase CSPS Creative Design Brief - Inception Phase Ada Programming Guidelines C++ Programming Guidelines Java Programming Guidelines Use Case Modeling Guidelines
UML Representation:	Not applicable.
More Information:

Purpose Brief Outline Properties Timing Responsibility Tailoring

Input to Activities:  Analyze Test Failure Architectural Analysis Class Design Compile Software Development Plan Conduct Review Create Baselines Create Integration Workspaces Database Design Define Test Approach Design the User Interface Detail a Business Entity Detail a Business Use Case Detail a Business Worker Find Actors and Use Cases Find Business Actors and Use Cases Find Business Workers and Entities Identify Business Goals Identify Design Elements Identify Testability Mechanisms Identify Test Ideas Implement Design Elements Implement Test Implement Test Suite Incorporate Existing Design Elements Launch Development Process Organize Review Prepare Guidelines for the Project Promote Baselines Prototype the User-Interface Review Change Request Review Code Review Requirements Review the Architecture Review the Business Analysis Model Review the Business Use-Case Model Review the Design Set Up Tools Structure the Business Use-Case Model Structure the Implementation Model Structure the Test Implementation Structure the Use-Case Model Submit Change Request Subsystem Design Use-Case Analysis Verify Tool Configuration and Installation

Output from Activities:  Prepare Guidelines for the Project Set Up Tools

Purpose

The Project-Specific Guidelines are used by the project members when performing the activities assigned to them. Guidelines are typically selected from an underlying repository controlled by the process group in the organization. This artifact is a place holder for the specific guidelines selected for the project.

Brief Outline

The outline is dependent on which of artifact the guideline describes. The Templates and Reports section above references templates for different types of project-specific guidelines. Inspect these links to see how the outline of a guideline's document can vary.

Properties

Guidelines should contain meta-information such as revision history, version information in addition to the actual content. The content itself is structured differently depending on what type of guideline it is. There are no UML representations for these properties.

Timing

A guideline is often harvested from project experience, and turned into a reusable asset outside the scope of the project that consumes it. See the process description in the Rational Process Workbench(TM) product for information on how to harvest and produce guidelines for cross project reuse. The selection of existing guidelines is usually done in the early days of the project, and is revisited for every iteration, based on the needs faced by the project for the upcoming iteration. Guidelines can also be initially created during the project. This can be done in any iteration during the life cycle of the project.

Responsibility

The Process Engineer role is primarily responsible for this artifact. Those responsibilities include:

• Selecting guidelines appropriate for the project.
• Preparing the guidelines by doing project-specific adjustments to make them more usable.
• Working with the subject matter experts to update these guidelines based on feedback from the consumers.
• Initiating the development of new guidelines needed by the project.
• Promoting any guidelines developed or improved during the project to the process group responsible for harvesting and producing assets for reuse.

Tailoring

Which guidelines to provide varies from project to project, and is based on what is available at the time of project execution. Guidelines might be specific to the production of a certain artifact, such as Guidelines: Development Case, or they might be applicable to a modeling technique such as Design Guidelines for UML modeling.

Each guideline should be tailored to fit the specific context of the project.

Rational Unified Process