The OpenUP family of processes aims at addressing a broad variety of project types while sharing a set of common characteristics. These are the key principles of:

• Collaborate to align interests and share understanding
• Evolve to continuously obtain feedback and improve
• Focus on the architecture early to minimize risks and organize development
• Balance competing priorities to maximize stakeholder value.

Processes in the OpenUP family are written as extensions to the core OpenUP process, which embraces a pragmatic, agile philosophy focusing on the collaborative nature of software development. This core OpenUP process is a tools-agnostic, low-ceremony process that can be extended to address a broad variety of project types.

By adding process plug-ins, extensions to OpenUP can be created that address a variety of development concerns, such as SOA, geographical distribution, model-driven architecture and embedded systems. Tool and technology specific guidance can be added, such as guidance on J2EE, and a variety of development tools. Some of these extensions can be quite modest, adding for example just tool specific guidance to existing tasks, while others could be quite comprehensive, creating processes that provide a radically expanded scope with new or altered artifacts, new or altered tasks, and new or altered roles.

As stated above, to qualify as members of the OpenUP family, extending processes must comply with the key principles of OpenUP and be written as extensions to the OpenUP core process.

Extensions to OpenUP can be:

• used internally by an organization
• open source as a part of the EPF project,
• made freely available outside the open source licenses of Eclipse (EPL)
• or sold commercially