Capability Pattern: Implementation

To help explain the work involved in the Implementation discipline, the activities and work products are organized into a capability pattern for the discipline.

Each activity represents a high-level goal that needs to be achieved to effectively complete implementation. Structure the Implementation Model is done early in the Elaboration phase. For each iteration, starting in Elaboration, you would Plan the Integration, Implement Components, Integrate each Subsystem, and finally Integrate the System. The two latter activities are closely related to integration test activities.

Usage Notes

Decide How to Perform the Workflow

The following decisions should be made regarding the Implementation discipline's workflow:

Decide how to perform the workflow by looking at the activities in this workflow. Study the diagram with its guard conditions and the guidelines below. Decide which activities to perform and in which order.
Decide what parts of the Implementation activities to perform. The following are some parts that can be introduced relatively independently from each other.

Part of workflow	Comments
Integration and build management	The role Integrator and the Activity: Plan the Integration together with the Artifact: Integration Build Plan are usually introduced early in the project. The other integration related activities, such as Task: Plan Subsystem Integration, Task: Integrate Subsystem, and Task: Integrate System are introduced just in time when the integration starts.
Implementing components	The roles Implementer and Reviewer, and their activities and artifacts, are introduced at the start of implementation, in each iteration.

Decide when, during the project lifecycle, to introduce each part of the workflow. You can often wait until the Elaboration phase before introducing the whole Implementation discipline. Any prototyping that occurs in the Inception phase is usually exploratory and is not conducted with the same rigor (with respect to artifacts and reviews, for example) as required by the complete Implementation workflow during elaboration and construction.