Being in the IT business for quite a while, I’ve came across quite a few project management methodologies, of which I found (IBM) Rational Unified Process (RUP) the most flexible and really universally useful. I’ve just recently (about fifteen minutes ago) found an upcoming rival to this methodology and that’s coming from the open source community it’s the OpenUP.

I was actually just routinely browsing through the project list at Eclipse to see if there are any interesting projects that I should know about. I found the Eclipse Process Framework Project interesting, but thought it will be some kind of process server. And I was quite surprised to see it actually is a community driven alternative to the big processes.

After downloading the package I’ve extracted it and started browsing in it. At the first glance it looked like what the name says: a rip off, of the RUP, but after going a bit deeper I decided it’s a complete rewrite of the thing. Currently only the basic process is being covered, but there are other configurations in progress (MDD, XP, Scrum)

It seems to come with a customization tool just like the real thing, so once the process is extended to cover everything you’ll have a chance of stripping it down to fit your actual environment needs. I’ve downloaded and tried the tool but didn’t find it too intuitive, I account this on me being very tired at the moment. It seems to me like it’s a tool for writing the processes, and not for customization yet.

This seems like a really nice project, and I have high hopes for this. After all companies sell their project management methodologies, trainings and stuff while most of it is common sense, and should be something more of a public domain thing.

Edit: You can find a version of OpenUP here