Based on which work products need to be produced and the formality level required for each work product, identify the set of guidelines needed by the project. Preparing guidelines is considered part of tailoring the process for the project and the process engineer will spend a fair amount of time with the project manager deciding which types of guidelines should be made available to the teams.

Project-specific guidelines serve several purposes, including :

• To provide prescriptive and relevant guidance on the production of certain work products.
• To ensure that work products are developed consistently and follow the defined conventions and styles.
• To describe certain standards required for the project adherence.
• To provide a precursor for staff reviewing the quality and completeness of the work products.

In the table below some of the most commonly considered guidelines for a software project are described. The RUP comes with examples of these that can be used as a starting point for project-specific tailoring.

Note: You don't need to decide on the complete set of guidelines upfront. Often, the need for guidelines and concrete examples is discovered during the work of preparing the environment for an iteration.

Sub-topics:

• Obtain Existing Guidelines
• Develop New Guidelines
• Tailor the Guidelines for Project Use
• Make the Guidelines Accessible

Obtain Existing Guidelines

The Process Engineer, who is responsible for the project-specific processes, continuously looks for useful existing guidelines or examples that can help the project members produce higher quality software more efficiently. Some guidelines may exist in the company's asset repository and are often a compilation of "organization-specific practices." Others fall into the category of "public standards" and can be found in existing literature or via the Internet.

Develop New Guidelines

Most guidelines are initially produced as project work products, such as the documentation of some micro-process inside a project, and as with most other assets, someone sees the value of the guideline outside the scope of the project and promotes it as a candidate for reuse.

When the decision is made to produce a new guideline inside the project, make sure it gets proper attention and is treated as an internal project work product. This includes allocating resources to produce and verify it and including it in the appropriate iteration plans.

In the first instance, developing the guideline for the specific context of the project is highly recommended. There exist numerous stories of projects being derailed because of the focus on generalizing work products for future reuse instead of developing them for the specific purpose at hand. As part of the organization's process improvement effort, consider making the produced guidelines reusable for future projects. The work of turning a guideline,or any project work product, into a reusable asset should ideally be accounted for outside the budget of the single project producing it in the first instance.

New guidelines may be developed anytime during the life cycle of the project. They are commonly developed "just-in-time" or as a task to document a successful approach to producing other work products.

Tailor the Guidelines

Guidelines and examples need to fit the context of the project, or they won't be used. Tailoring the guideline to fit the project is the responsibility of the process engineer and some key representatives from the consumers. It is particularly important to make an effort to tailor guidelines that are harvested from other projects, as they may have been developed for a slightly different context.

You should capture any tailoring decisions made as they may prove useful for future projects wanting to reuse the same guideline.

Make the Guidelines Accessible

As important as the tailoring is to the guidelines, the accessibility of the prepared guidelines is equally important. It should be clear to the consumers where they should go to find the guidelines or an example and also to whom they should provide feedback on usage.

You can make the guidelines available via the published process Web site using the RUP plug-in technology, where the guidelines can be associated with the work products and tasks they relate to. See Concept: Tailoring RUP for further information.