EXTREME PROGRAMMING AND RATIONAL UNIFIED PROCESS – CONTRASTS OR SYNONYMS?

The agile movement has received much attention in software engineering recently. Established methodologies try to surf on the wave and present their methodologies a being agile, among those Rational Unified Process (RUP). In order to evaluate the statements we evaluate the RUP against eXtreme Programming (XP) to find out to what extent they are similar end where they are different. We use a qualitative approach, utilizing a framework for comparison. RUP is a top-down solution and XP is a bottom-up approach. Which of the two is really best in different situations has to be investigated in new empirical studies.