Role: Process Engineer
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The Process Engineer is one of the support roles in RUP. Its main goal is to equip the project team with an efficient and lean development process, and to make sure that the team members are not hindered in doing their jobs. |
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Description
Process Engineers play an important part of any management team of a software project. The role is responsible for all process related aspects of the project, such as :
- Tailoring the process to match the specific needs of the project.
- Educating and mentoring project members on process related issues.
- Ensuring that valuable project experience is harvested and fed back into the process.
- Assisting the Project Manager in planning the project.
Related Information
This role relates to the following RUP information:
- Whitepaper: A Comparison of RUP and XP
- Concept: Agile Practices and RUP
- Whitepaper: An Enabler for Higher Process Maturity
- Whitepaper: Developing Large-Scale Systems with the Rational Unified Process
- Guideline: Development Case
- Concept: Effect of Implementing a Process
- Concept: Implementing a Process in a Project
- Concept: Mentoring
- Concept: Pilot Project
- Whitepaper: Reaching CMM Levels 2 and 3
- Whitepaper: System Variants
- Whitepaper: The Ten Essentials of RUP
- Concept: The Underlying Model of the Rational Unified Process
- Whitepaper: Using the RUP for Small Projects: Expanding upon eXtreme Programming
Staffing
Having good people playing this role is key to the success of the project. As a service provider to the project members, any individual performing this role needs to have a good mix of soft skills and process knowledge.
Skills
It is important for a person playing the Process Engineer role to have an in-depth understanding of the underlying process definition to be able to make informed choices about its configuration. Ideally, a person playing this role should have had multiple experiences working on software projects that used RUP as the software development process, and should understand the various considerations to be made when tailoring RUP to suit the context of a specific software project.
The appropriate skills and knowledge for the Process Engineer role include:
- First hand knowledge of the structure of the RUP, and of the supporting tool set for creating customized processes.
- Good communication skills to be able to present the process to the teams and to encourage individual team members to provide feedback to improve the process.
Role assignment approaches
The Process Engineer role can be assigned in the following ways:
- Assign the person filling the Project Manager role to the Process Engineer role. This is a common approach for small teams and for teams where there are no dedicated process engineering resources available.
- For larger organizations, individuals filling this role are often part of a process group that defines organizational configurations and act as process mentors on projects.
- It is common practice for organizations new to the RUP and iterative development to look for resources outside the company for filling this role for the first RUP driven projects.
Further Reading
For further information on process engineering in general, see the Process Engineering Process, a RUP-like process description that ships with the Rational Process Workbench(TM) product.
