Rapid Prototyping, Rapid Application Development and Requirements Engineering

Prototypes have been created as models for various aspects of software systems, including user interfaces, functional requirements relating outputs to inputs, and performance issues such as response times. A model or prototype will accurately reflect chosen aspects of a system, while deviating from the proposed system in other respects.

The benefits of rapid prototyping are chiefly in developing a more accurate understanding of user requirements. The use of rapid prototyping should thus result in lower costs in the long-run from higher quality systems and less software development projects being failures. The introduction of rapid prototyping, as is true of any new tools or new software processes, will incur start-up costs.

Since prototyping is principally useful in requirements engineering, resources for rapid prototyping on the Internet are sometimes intermixed in with requirements engineering resources. Thus, the Internet resources catalogued on this Web include some general requirements engineering resources.