IBM Rational team launched EPF more than five years ago with a premise of creating an open source like community for software development processes and methodologies. Unfortunately, from the beginning, the Rational team was not willing to give up control and EPF has been only open in name than in reality. I would say, 99% of the contribution so far has been from IBM. Initially EPF was supposed to be a kernel based methodology. Plug-ins were to be added to the kernel as to satisfy the requirements of development project environments. This takes an additive adoption of methodology rather than RUP’s trimming approach. After few years of taking this approach, suddenly EPF changed direction and took a practice based approach. Now it seems that the IBM Rational team has abandoned EPF and has moved to their latest story: Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF). I don’t know much about MCIF right now, but intent to research it.

My point is that this is an irresponsible behavior by respected methodologies, it confuses the potential adaptors and the grater market. I rather have IBM methodologies (content team) keep a low profile and let the badly need Jazz (very impressive IBM tool to rival VSTS) based tools flourish.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 4th, 2009 at 5:35 pm and is filed under General, Processes & Methodologies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.