I’m currently the architect on a project that is heavily RUP (Rational Unified Process) centric. As we are pushing through the government’s C&A (Certification and Accreditation) process, the government project manager “found out” that the project must comply with the DoDAF (Department of Defense Architecture Framework). This was a little bit of a surprise since you would normally expect this type of requirement to pop up somewhere closer to Inception. But, here we are, so the goal is to meet the requirement without having to recreate the architecture and design that has been developed under the Rational Unified Process.
DoDAF is a framework that is designed to handle almost anything that the Department of Defense may need to acquire/build. It provides no methodology – just “views” of the enterprise. These views are broken into 3 categories (Operational, Systems, Technical Standards) as well as the ominous sounding “All View”. These “views” are, in fact, a series of documentation and diagrams used to provide insight onto the project from a particular perspective.
RUP is a process for building applications. It can be seen as a set of best practices to help ensure that the project will meet the customer’s needs. It includes its own set of documentation (UML) for accomplishing the same goals as DoDAF. So, my initial reaction was that this was going to be a major exercise in being redundant.
The good news is that it is not turning out to be the case at all. RUP employs UML to model the application. DoDAF does not specify UML, but considers UML to be an acceptable method for completing many of the views. So, much of the work is done. Obviously, it would have been better to have employed the DoDAF with RUP from the beginning and keep everything in sync. Given that the both use UML, it would be fairly straightforward to follow the RUP process while complying with DoDAF without much additional work.
Some interesting links on the topic:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/mar06/widney/index.html
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/rational/web/whitepapers/G507-1903-00_v5_LoRes.pdf.
Tags: design, Enterprise architecture, process