The Inception Phase

The primary goals of the Inception phase are to achieve stakeholder consensus regarding the objectives for the project and to obtain funding. The major activities of the phase include:

Define project scope. This includes defining, at a high level, what the system will do. Equally important is to define what the system will not do. This establishes the boundaries within which the team will operate. This usually tales the form of a list of high-level features and/or point form use cases.
Estimate cost and schedule. At a high level, the schedule and cost for the project are estimated. General estimates are used for iterations in later phases, more specificity is used for the early iterations in Elaboration. This should not be construed as meaning that the entire project is planned out at this point. As with all planning, those tasks that are to be completed in the near future are detailed more accurately and with greater confidence while tasks further down the line are understood to be estimates with larger margins of error. It has (finally) been recognized by most in the industry that it is not possible to schedule an entire project at its kick-off with any acceptable degree of confidence. The best that can be done is to plan for the near term accurately and the longer term as best as you can.
Define risks. The risks to the project are first defined here. Risk management is important an AUP project. The list of risks is a living compilation that will change over time as risks are identified, mitigated, avoided and/or materialize and dealt with. Risks drive the management of the project, as the highest priority risks drive the scheduling of iterations. Higher priority risks, for example, are addressed in earlier iterations than lower priority risks.
Determine project feasibility. Your project must make sense from technical, operational, and business perspectives. In other words, you should be able to build it, once it's deployed you should be able to run it, and it should make economic sense to do these things. If the your project isn't feasible, it should be cancelled.
Prepare the project environment. This includes reserving workspace for the team, requesting the people that will be needed, obtaining hardware and software that are needed immediately, and compiling a list of anticipated hardware and software that will be needed later. In addition you will tailor the AUP to meet your team's exact needs.

To exit the Inception phase your team must pass the Lifecycle Objectives (LCO) milestone. The main issues are whether the team understands the scope of the effort sufficiently and whether the stakeholders wish to fund the project. If the team passes this milestone the project moves to the Elaboration phase, otherwise the project may be re-directed or cancelled outright.

Work By Discipline

Discipline	Major Activities
Model	Initial, high-level requirements modeling Initial, high-level architectural modeling
Implementation	Technical prototyping User interface prototyping
Test	Initial test planning Review initial project management work products Review initial models
Deployment	Identify the potential release window Begin high-level deployment planning
Configuration Management	Setup the configuration environment Put all work products under CM control
Project Management	Start building the team Build relationships with your project stakeholders Determine project feasibility Develop a high-level schedule for the entire project Develop a detailed iteration plan for the upcoming iteration Manage risk Obtain stakeholder support and funding Close out the phase
Environment	Set up the working environment Identify the project category

Page last updated: May 13, 2006

This page is tailored with permission from Ambysoft Inc.'s Agile UP Product