Outsourcing and technology firm Xansa has announced that at the latest meeting of the Eclipse Process Framework project hosted by the company, the project team agreed on a launch plan and a date of release for the open source process.

At the recent meeting held at Xansa’s offices in Reading, industry leaders from the software engineering community outlined the final plans for the launch of the project. Details for incorporating a project management discipline into the framework as well as a plug-in for model driven architecture were also discussed.

The project team is made up of experts drawn from a number of leading technology companies, collaborating to produce an open-source framework for software development best practice known as the Open Unified Process (OpenUP). OpenUP builds on the discipline of the Rational Unified Process.

The first release of the framework is scheduled for September 2006 and the product will continue to evolve beyond this date as new features are added. OpenUP will provide exemplary and extensible process content for a range of software development and management needs, supporting iterative, agile, and incremental development. Over time, it will grow to provide a comprehensive methods library covering a wide range of development platforms and applications, available free of charge.

Mark Dickson, principal solution architect at Xansa PLC and team leader for the software architecture process content, commented: “OpenUP represents a significant evolution in the management software development and the open source model. It brings together the shared experiences from some of the industry’s most experienced practioners and makes this body of knowledge available in a way which enables organizations to easily adopt and adapt to suit their needs.”