• Objectives
• Activities
• Artifacts

Inception phase

The ``The Rational Unified Process, An Introduction''[9] specifies the following objectives, activities, and artifacts from an inception phase.

Objectives

• Establish project's scope and boundary conditions.
• Determine the critical uses of the system.
• Exhibiting at least one candidate architecture against some of the primary scenarios.
• Estimating the overall cost and schedule for the entire project.
• Estimating potential risks.

Activities

• Formulate the scope of the project.
• Plan and prepare the business case, including alternatives for risk management, staffing, project plan, and trade-offs between cost, schedule, and profitability.
• Develop a candidate architecture.

Artifacts

• A vision document.
• A use-case model survey.
• An initial project glossary.
• An initial business case.
• An initial risk assessment.
• A project plan.
• Other possible items:
  • An initial use-case model.
  • An initial domain model.
  • One or more prototypes.