Written by Haakan Dyrhage. All Rights Reserved.

A PDF version of this article is available, however, you must have Adobe Acrobat installed to view it. You can download other Rational Unified Process (RUP) white papers from the IBM Web site.

Abstract

This paper discusses what variants of systems are and how to manage them. You do not need to read this to understand the RUP; on the contrary, it should be treated as an extension to the RUP. The last section briefly discusses how the RUP would be affected by the introduction of variants and variability.

This is an area in which the RUP will improve and expand in the future and this paper gives a first taste of that.