Every methodology I've come across has, at its kernel, a very small
section labelled "do magic here".

RUP is much the same. You draw the user interaction diagrams, you do
the flow things, <magic happens here>, you draw class diagrams with
methods and stuff and then they get turned into code and the
application falls out of the bottom of the process.

Reciprocality[1] talks about something called "complexity
smearing". Which is where the class of people referred to as "packers"
shuffle things around and write larger and larger documents, with the
end result that the complexity is all broken up and spread out and no
single page actually contains noticable complexity. It's still there,
but it's hidden inside a lot of words.

A lot of the rest of it reads like the writings of raving madmen, but
there are bits of it which sound disturbing sensible.

RUP looks scarily like a way of hiding that complexity in lots of
pages so it doesn't look worrying to the packers and they think
they've "solved" it.

Now, don't get me wrong here, I think it has its uses.

I think having nice standardised diagrams of stuff like that is REALLY
useful. One OO architect drops dead and your replacement walks in and
can pick up the documents and read them because they already speak
that language. That's a great thing. I sort of wish it had been pushed
as being that -- a lingua franca for documenting designs.

Instead it's pushed as a way of getting normal people to do something
normal people can't do. Normal people can't do OO design properly. I
don't mean that derogatively as such. I can't draw still life, I can't
run 100m races {Well, these days I can't walk 100m races, but even as
a kid I was crap at the 100m}. People have various different
talents. One of those talents is doing OO design and some people just
can't do it. No matter how much paperwork you surround it with.

And at the core of RUP is a small area where you have to use OO design
talents.... if you don't have them, it's like having a methodology for
running the 100m.

"Step 1: write about running really fast. Step 2: Go and draw a plan
of the racetrack. Step 3: go and buy really tight lycra shorts. Step
4: run really, really, really fast. Step 5: cross line first"

It's that step 4 that's the tough one. But if you put lots of emphasis
on 1,2,3 and 5 it's possible no-one will notice and then you could
probably make a lot of money selling the methodology to would be
athletes who think there's some "secret" to being a 100m runner over
and above being born with the ability to run fast.

Unfortunately, the outcome of RUP is that you end up with extremely
well documented TERRIBLE designs. Unless you have a good OO designer
to start with. In which case they'd have come up with a good design
anyway, but on less paper.

As I say -- if you regard it as a standardised writing system that's
portable between companies, the whole thing works OK.



[1] People have asked about this, so I'll clarify. "Reciprocity" was
part of the original name for the concepts discussed here;

http://the-programmers-stone.com/the-original-talks/day-1-thinking-about-thinking/

The authors postulate that humanity has two populations of thinkers;
"mappers" and "packers". The former are people who get bored and
optimise processes to remove repetition. Along the way they present
various arguments to support this based on the behaviours ascribed to
the two groups.