News

IBM Donates RUP Assets to Open Source Community

• By Kathleen Ohlson
• October 12, 2005

Big Blue this week plans to contribute software development blueprints to the Eclipse Foundation to help developers make fewer coding mistakes.

IBM will donate a subset of the Rational Unified Process, a software process platform that allows organizations to tie business and development units together. RUP is a collection of methods and best practices for promoting quality and efficiency throughout software development projects. The company’s donation also includes foundation architecture and Web-based tools to share software development best practices.

According to IBM, the lack of standards in core development activities has increased time and overhead for organizations. They are continually reproducing the myriad of processes, plans and compliance documents that are fundamental in software development. Best practices are often kept within an individual team or company.

Nearly half of internally developed software projects run over budget, 90 percent are completed late, and 30 percent are canceled, IBM says. Fifteen to 20 percent of all software defects reach customers, costing the U.S. economy $60 billion a year, according to the Standish Group.

“IBM is doing for the software development process what Eclipse has done for the integration of software tools, what Apache did for Web application servers, and what Linux did for operating systems,” says Daniel Sabbah, general manager for IBM Rational Software. The donation will provide the architecture and tools to seed an ecosystem for software practitioners, technology vendors, universities, researchers and others to communicate, publish and reuse best practices.

Capgemini, BearingPoint, Number Six Software, Ivar Jacobson International, Object Mentor, Sogeti and Wind River are some companies joining IBM in the RUP open-source project.