RUP hump

The term RUP ‘hump’ chart refers to a plot of effort spent over time during a particular RUP discipline. The RUP hump chart consists of a collection of humps for all RUP disciplines. This diagram was created in 1993 during a workshop on architecture and process [P. Kruchten. A brief history of the RUP’s “hump chart”. Technical report, University of British Columbia, 2003.] and was inspired upon work by Booch [G. Booch. Object solutions: managing the object-oriented project. Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Redwood City, CA, USA, 1995.] and Boehm [B. Boehm. A spiral model of software development and enhancement. SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes, 11(4):14–24, 1986.] [B. W. Boehm. A spiral model of software development and enhancement. Computer, 21(5):61–72, 1988.] . It has been part of the Rational Objectory Process after reviews by Dyrhage and Bylund and moved on to play a more important role in the RUP in 1998 when it served as the initial page for using the digital version of the process [P. Kruchten. A brief history of the RUP’s “hump chart”. Technical report, University of British Columbia, 2003.] . Its final form was published by Kruchten in 1998 [P. Kruchten. The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, USA, 2003.] . An older version as later used by Jacobson, Booch and Rumbaugh [I. Jacobson, G. Booch, and J. Rumbaugh. The unified software development process. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, USA, 1999.] and an altered version was used by Royce [W. Royce. Software project management: a unified framework. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, USA, 1998.] . The latest version of the RUP chart is depicted in figure 1. Over the years, this diagram has become increasingly connected with RUP in such a manner that sometimes it is perceived as if it was intended as a logo for the process. The chart has then since been spread widely over the Internet. A known misconception about the hump chart is, that it is based on empirical assessment of actual projects rather than on the educated guess of Kruchten.

...I always insisted that these humps were just illustrative, as well as the number and duration of iterations shown on the horizontal axis, but many people wanted to read much more meaning in that diagram that I intended. For example, a gentleman from Korea once wrote me to ask for a large original diagram to measure the heights, and ‘integrate' the area under the humps, to help him do project estimation...

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