Why Are You Prototyping?

Spend sufficient time confirming the need and the need will disappear.

Specification Dynamics

Beware of the prototyping trap. If you ask two programmers on the same Visual Basic team what a prototype is, you're likely to get two different answers. Often the team is unclear whether or not the prototype is a throwaway. Ensure that the term "prototype" is well defined and that everyone (including the users) is familiar with this definition. You might even choose to define different types of prototypes. The big trap is to leave the "prototype" ill-defined. We have seen this lead to much grief on many Visual Basic projects. Prototyping in general has been given a bad name because of frequent misuse.

Delivering quickly is often the justification for a prototyping approach to development. But without control, the "what" that is delivered usually fails to meet the business needs for robustness and maintainability.

To be successful, prototyping must have specific goals, such as these:

  • Goals to demonstrate feasibility

  • Analysis goals to discover or confirm requirements

  • Design goals to prove the technology or an approach to implementation

  • Implementation goals to evolve a working system with user involvement within a predefined technical architecture

Uncontrolled prototyping, without goals and a development strategy to produce an application architecture, is doomed. It is hacking with respectability.

Prototyping can be used at various stages during development. The key principle that will ensure that prototyping is used correctly is to precisely define the objectives of the prototype and then ensure that appropriate disciplines are used to deliver these objectives. Rules such as "Prototypes must be thrown away" are unnecessarily restrictive.



Ltd Mandelbrot Set International Advanced Microsoft Visual Basics 6. 0
Advanced Microsoft Visual Basic (Mps)
ISBN: 1572318937
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1997
Pages: 168

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net