The communication and collaboration layer is the foundation for OpenUP, reflecting the collaborative nature of the process. It contains all of the roles in OpenUP: stakeholder, analyst, developer, architect, tester, project manager, and any role. Team members taking on these roles need to collaborate to jointly capture and define the intent of the stakeholders, to jointly develop the solution, and to jointly manage the project.

This foundational layer reflects and enables us to express the nature of self-organized teams, where team members must broaden their perspectives of what their roles are and where their responsibilities end. As an example, the analyst cannot say “I documented the requirements, now it is up to the developer to implement them.” The analyst's job is not primarily to document requirements; it is to communicate that the stakeholder intent is understood and reflected in a validated build. Documenting requirements may help you achieve that objective, but it is only one of many available tools. Other tools you can use include working with developers on the design, working with testers on what needs to be tested, and using the build to ensure that it does what the stakeholders need it to do.

To help the team collaborate effectively, the foundational collaboration layer provides you with a set of practices organized by core principles that have been shown to motivate effective collaboration. These practices apply to work done in the other layers too.