Concepts: Development Environment

Topics

• Development environment for a project
• Organizational development environment
• Test Environments

Development Environment for a Project

The development environment for a software development project is the term for all things the project needs to develop and deploy the system, such as tools, guidelines, process, templates, and infrastructure. All of these are represented as artifacts in the Rational Unified Process listed below:

• Artifact: Development Infrastructure
• Artifact: Development Case
• Artifact: Tools
• Artifact: Project-Specific Templates
• Artifact: Project-Specific Guidelines, such as:
  • Tool Usage Guidelines
  • Business Modeling Guidelines
  • Use-Case Modeling Guidelines
  • User-Interface Guidelines
  • Design Guidelines
  • Programming Guidelines
  • Test Guidelines
• Artifact: CM Plan
• Artifact: Manual Styleguide

Sometimes it's useful to discuss parts of the project's development environment, examples of which are:

• The Test environment which may include:
  • Templates for the test artifacts, such as Test Plan and Test Evaluation Summary
  • Project-Specific Test Guidelines
  • Test tools, such as:
    • Rational Robot,
    • Rational TestFactory,
    • Rational Purify Plus,
    • Rational TestManager
  • The necessary basic hardware and software infrastructure
    
    
• The Implementation environment which may include:
  • Templates for the implementation artifacts, such as the Integration Build Plan
  • Project-Specific Programming Guidelines
  • Implementation tools, such as:
    • compilers and debuggers
    • Rational ClearCase,
    • Rational Rose,
    • Rational XDE (IBM WebSphere Studio),
    • Rational XDE (for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET),
    • Rational Purify Plus,
    • Rational Test RealTime,
  • The necessary basic hardware and software infrastructure

Organizational Development Environment

There are often many similarities between different projects in a development organization.  The projects use the same tools in a similar way. The process is similar between different projects and some guidelines are probably identical. Therefore, a development organization can gain from having a team to develop and maintain an organizational development environment that consists of an organization-wide process, tool use, and infrastructure.

This environment team will have process engineers who develop and maintain an organization-wide process. By having an organization-wide process, the separate software development projects have to do less customization of the process because a lot of that would have already been done for the organization-wide process. The process engineers act as mentors on the individual software development projects.

The environment team can also have a tool specialists who sets up and maintains the supporting tools. Tool specialists from this team could assist the individual software development projects to set up the tools. System administrators can also be part of the environment team.

Process engineers, tools specialists, and system administrators develop a development environment for the organization.

Test Environments

In most cases, the requirements for testing environments are more specific, detailed and rigorous than the basic development environment. Test environments are often technically less sophisticated than the development environment (the hardware requirements are less). There are also often multiple environments needing to support software testing activities, in which the configuration of hardware and software will differ, representing different stakeholder constraints.
For more information, see Artifact: Test Environment Configuration.

Rational Unified Process