A reduced set of RUP roles to small software development teams

Software projects are always increasing their complexity. The complexity of projects arises due to the increased sophistication of software applications and of their implemented features. However, most of the projects are developed by small organizations. Since these companies have a reduced dimension, the number of individuals that constitute each software development teams will also be significantly reduced. This paper describes a Rational Unified Process (RUP) configuration composed by a reduced set of RUP roles. This configuration may easily be adopted by a small software development team during the project execution period. Additionally, we have characterized each role in this reduced model by identifying the corresponding activities in charge and by creating individual sheets detailing their responsibilities. An initial assessment of the effectiveness of this RUP configuration was performed using CMMI-DEV maturity level 2 (ML2) as a reference model.