Rapid Prototyping: For Want of Better Words

摘要

Rapid prototyping is widely promoted as being an effective technique to assist the development of complex systems. While the phase is commonly used and discussed within the software system development community, the interpretation is somewhat diverse and the technique itself has not been widely adopted in practice. This paper reviews the recent literature on the subject of 'rapid prototyping' and in highlighting key texts, aims to provide a definition of the terminology and tries to put prototyping into context as a necessary and integral component of the software system development life cycle. The paper discusses the incompatibility of prototyping and the traditional life cycle model and proposes an alternative life cycle model which incorporates prototyping as an integral activity.