Activity: Deliver Changes

Prepare for Delivery

Delivery addresses the notion of integration of work from streams of implementers. As such, delivery is an important step and a 'quality gate' of reviews and approvals need to be passed before work can be accepted into a higher level 'staging area'.

A good project policy is to require developers to rebase their development workspaces to the project's current recommended baseline before accepting their work into the project's integration workspace. The goal of this policy is to have developers build and test their work in their development areas against the work included in the most recent stable baselines before they deliver to the integration workspace. This practice minimizes the amount of merging that developers must do when they perform deliver operations. 

Another good project policy is to ensure that all files are checked-in prior to delivery. This avoids the situation of having orphaned files that are not included in a build and might be needed for subsequent updates.

Delivery is an important step that implies that a developer considers his work to be of sufficiently high quality to be incorporated into the overall product.

It should be part of the Project Policy on who is to review given artifacts, and what level of quality they are to have achieved before being acceptable for usage by the rest of the project team members. Some guidance on reviews in provided in the Guidelines: Reviews. Many of the artifacts in the Rational Unified Process have associated 'checkpoints' that can be used to assess the quality of particular artifacts. For instance, if an artifact is found to be deficient on more than a given number of checkpoints it is submitted for re-work, and thereby not eligible for 'promotion'.

Deliver Changes

A common project policy is to require the developer to merge his/her changes with those made by other developers. This is typically done in a private integration workspace, so that the merged changes may be tested prior to final delivery to the project integration workspace. The delivery is complete when all merge changes have been checked-in and delivered.

Update Work Order Status

Update the status of the work order (for example, set to "Completed" if all the work has been done) as defined by your project's Configuration Management Plan.

Rational Unified Process