Phase 4 of Unified Process Life cycle - Transition

Unified process is one of the best development processes we have of the iterative and incremental form. The whole unified process is completed in four phases which have been mentioned below:

1. Inception phase
2. Elaboration phase
3. Construction phase and lastly
4. Transition phase

This whole article is all about the last phase i.e., the transition phase. In this whole article we are going to discuss about the last phase. 

What is a Transition Phase?

- The final phase of the unified process i.e., the transition phase involves the deployment of the system for targeting the customers.

- The feedback that is collected on the account of the previous releases helps in further refining or improving the software system or application. 

- It can also be decided over the further functionality that have to be added to the software system or application under development to make it much better. 

- Transition phase like all of the preceding three phases is composed of several timed iterations that are time boxed. 

- Apart from just targeting the users, the transition phase also involves user training and the system conversions. 

- The transition phase has been named so because it is in this phase that the transition of the whole system from development to production takes place and software is made available to the users. 

- Along with the end users in some cases the maintainers might also be treated. 

- This phase also witnesses the beta testing of the software system or application so that it is validated against the expectations of the end users. 

- A certain quality level is set in the phase i.e., in the inception phase which is tested in against by the quality of the software system or application in the transition phase. 

- The point at which all the objectives are met is called the “product release milestone”. 

- At this point the product is declared finished and the development is also declared to be complete. 

- The unified process is quite a robust software process that is meant for addressing the development as well as the production needs of the users and the customers. 

- We need a software development process that serves the scope of our real world quite well and provides us with a balanced perspective of the alternative programming methodologies available from all around the field. 

- In this transition phase, if there are any legacy systems that you are going to replace, then your whole software system or application is operated in parallel with those legacy systems. 

- This leads to the conversion of the legacy data bases and the systems in to an improved one that supports your new software system or application. 

Goals of transition Phase

The transition phase has got three main goals as mentioned below:

1.Evolving the final product baseline or the production base line of the software system or the application.

2.Training the materials for the software system or application.

3.Creation of the documentation which is inclusive of all the user manuals, operations documentation and the support documentation.

Issues faced during Transition Phase

- This phase is concluded with the product release milestone. 

- Achieving this milestone is not so easy since you have to satisfy all the expectations of the end users and also justify the actual expenditures against the planned expenditure. 

- Issues such as finishing the features that were postponed usually arise after the product has been transited to the end users or customers. 

- The production baseline ought to be mature enough to be deployed in the end user domain. 

- The operational data bases are also converted and the final product is released for marketing, distribution and sales team.