Development

According to RUP a typical development project at Smartech would consist of the following phases:

Inception
The overriding goal of the inception phase is to achieve concurrence among all stakeholders on the lifecycle objectives for the project. The inception phase is of significance primarily for new development efforts, in which there are significant business and requirements risks, which must be addressed before the project can proceed. For projects focused on enhancements to an existing system, the inception phase is briefer, but is still focused on ensuring that the project is both worth doing and possible to be done.

Elaboration
The goal of the elaboration phase is to baseline the architecture of the system to provide a stable basis for the bulk of the design and implementation effort in the construction phase. The architecture evolves out of a consideration of the most significant requirements (those that have a great impact on the architecture of the system) and an assessment of risk. The stability of the architecture is evaluated through one or more architectural prototypes.

Construction
The focus of the construction phase is on clarifying of the remaining requirements and completing the development of the system based upon the baseline architecture. The construction phase is in some sense a manufacturing process, where emphasis is placed on managing resources and controlling operations to optimize costs, schedules, and quality. In this sense the management mindset undergoes a transition from the development of intellectual property during inception and elaboration to the development of deployable products during construction and transition.

Transition
The goal of the Transition Phase is to ensure that software is available for its end users. The Transition Phase can span several iterations, and includes testing the product in preparation for release, and making minor adjustments based on user feedback. At this point in the lifecycle, user feedback should focus mainly on fine-tuning the product, configuring, installing and usability issues, all the major structural issues should have been worked out much earlier in the project lifecycle.

By the end of the Transition Phase lifecycle objectives should be met and the project should be in a position to be closed out. In some cases, the end of the current life cycle may coincide with the start of another lifecycle on the same product, leading to the next generation or version of the product. For other projects, the end of Transition may coincide with a complete delivery of the artifacts to a third party which may be responsible for operations, maintenance and enhancements of the delivered system.