Seems that a new consultancy firm or bunch of academics come up with a new best way of doing software development every now and then. There'll be a whole lot of noise, a few high profile dev-shops will pick it up... then it'll probably disappear into obscurity shortly after.
The other thing I've seen with "standard" processes is that they are a perfect example of everything and nothing. You then tailor them for your purpose and team(s) and you end up with your own mix-and-match derivative that isn't really standard anymore... [rolleyes]
Do I sound cynical? Because I'm not, honest - I'm an "optimistic realist" [lol]
Anyway, my employer sent me on a course Thurs/Fri of this week. Was kind of amusing because I got an email last week telling me I couldn't go on the course, which was odd because I never knew I was on the list. The next day I get offered a cancellation and off I go to Sunny Slough...
The course was "Applying the essential unified process," provided by Ivar Jacobson Consulting (Ivar Jacobson's company being the pioneer of unified process, bought about by rational ('rational unified process') and then being bought out by IBM).
Now I'm very aware I could regret writing this in 6-12 months time, but I think EssUP's got something here. There's a certain maturity and common sense aspect that seems to work - less of the "here's our way, the right way, do it exactly like this as everything else is wrong" and more of a "look at what you've got, work out the pain points, here are some alternatives, phase them in and adapt them to suit you"...
I couldn't really do the topic justice to cover all the key points in a journal entry but I do recommend you take the time to check it out should you be interested in such things.
Given that my day job has *NO* development practice, process or any of the other usual niceties I've taken to reading about such things. Too much process can be as bad as a rubbish process, but neither have anything on NO process whatsoever [wow]
If middle management buys into the "cult of Agile" without understanding what parts of it work for them, then that's even worse than having no process at all.