The goal of this touch point is to to ensure the requirements for an application are fully considered and
addressed within the requirements discipline by working closely with the Service Level Management (SLM) process.
SLM is all about balancing the constraints on Customer requirements and Provider capability so that the
level of IT service needed to support the business can be determined, and monitoring can be initiated to identify
whether the required service levels are being achieved, as depicted in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Balancing Customer Requirements and Provider Capabilities
As an integral part to the RUP Requirements discipline the system development team needs to include
service level requirements as the service progresses through application design and development. In turn
the SLM process team needs to proactively interact with the system development team to maintain and
improve IT Services quality, through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring and reporting upon IT Service
achievements and taking action to eradicate poor service - in line with Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Documenting and gaining Customer and Provider agreement on service levels and detailed service
specifications is key to:
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establishing and maintaining agreement with the customers and other stakeholders on what the system should do,
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provide system developers with a better understanding of the system requirements.
When applying requirements management using Use Cases, Service Level Management Documents as depicted in Figure 2, need to be
included as input to the RUP tasks Find Actors and Use Cases, Detail a Use Case and Develop Supplementary Specifications. As a result Service Level Management
Documents should be referenced in the RUP artifacts Use Case and Supplementary Specifications.
When applying requirements management using a more traditional approach, Service Level Management Documents need
to be included as a source of input to the RUP tasks Detail the Software Requirements. As a result Service Level
Management Documents should be referenced in the RUP artifacts Software Requirement and Software Requirements Specification.
Figure 2 - Service Level Management Documents
As a summary, here are the relationships between RUP and ITUP elements at touch point:
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