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 work products, 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 Guideline: Reviews. Many of the work products in the Rational Unified Process have an
associated 'checklist' that can be used to assess the quality of that work product. For instance, if an work
product 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'.
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