-Developed by Philippe Kruchten, Ivar Jacobson, and others at Rational Software

-Now a commercial product

• Complements other UML (Universal Modeling Language) based products
• Customizable framework for software design and development
• Prescriptive guidelines, templates and examples

-Not a "Light" Process

• Over a dozen "disciplines" (rows in figure below)
• Over a hundred artifacts to be defined
• Even less light as practiced by some organizations (using a waterfall model)

-Work also done in iterations

The Phases and Iterations of A typical RUP project [ Ref. 3]