Prototyping And Its Use Of Prototyping

Another way of successfully gathering information is by building a prototype or model of the system, so that users can test or get an idea of what the finished product will be like. With this they can determine issues, problems, or inconsistency with the system. Another important part of gathering information is organizing it so that it can be understood and put to proper use. I propose categorizing the requirements into functional requirements, operational requirements, technical requirements, and transitional requirements. The functional requirements define how the user thinks the system is functioning overall, the operational requirements define what background processes need to be executed in order for the system to work optimally over a period of time, the technical requirements define what technical issues that must be addressed in order to successfully implement the system, and the transitional requirements define the processes or steps needed to implement the system smoothly and successfully. ("Mind Tools", 2012).

The current development process devotes a large amount of time at the front end of development to establishing customer needs and converting them into system level requirements. The client-site team meets with customers, learns their needs, develops specifications, verifies them with the customers, and then sends them offshore for development. This is a very formalized, documented process. (+)

In this essay, I will introduce what I did in this semester of this course, and also will outline what I learnt from this course and in the process of the design and prototype making. Meanwhile, I will reflect what I would to do if I met the iteration of design and prototyping for the same problem space. And in the last part of this essay, a reflection analysis of the project, which related to the theoretical context provided by the lecture material and self-directed research will be provided in this essay.

There is a wide array of rapid prototyping software available in the market today. They range from WebZap, Balsamiq, Pencil and paper, all the way to Bootstrap. In this assignment, special focus will be given to the review of Bootstrap.

Prototyping can augment this process because it converts these basic, yet sometimes intangible, specifications into a tangible but limited working model of the desired information system. Baderman Island’s user feedback gained from developing a physical system that the users can touch and see facilitates an evaluative response that the analyst can employ to modify existing requirements as well as developing new ones. Some Advantages of Prototyping:

Competitive Prototyping (CP) is a mandatory process in the Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition system in which, two or more competing teams develop prototypes during the early stages of an acquisition or procurement phase for the purpose of comparing then choosing the prototype that best addresses key issues, problems, or challenges. The mandate for CP has its roots in the DoD 5000 series of regulations governing the Defense Acquisition Management System. Prior to 2008, several revisions of the 5000 series periodically included mandates for CP. The latest revision was in 2008, when the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, issued a new DoD instruction (DoDI 5000.02, Dec. 8, 2008) which contains

Throw-away prototyping is useful to use when sketching is not enough, and it requires to show the working of features or when need to show the actual performance or response. TheThrow-away prototyping has many advantages and it is efficient to use, but somehow it become difficult and risky when dealing with stakeholders and have little knowledge of technical background and in context of tuff deadline and limited resources.

Project Pluto will adopt the Incremental-build model to deliver the required objectives. It is a build-test-demonstrate model of iterative development in which frequent demonstrations of progress and verification and validation of work to date are emphasized. Business requirements are allocated to various elements of the software architecture, and the architecture is partitioned into a prioritized sequence of builds. Each build adds new capabilities to the incrementally growing product. The Incremental-build model provides Project Pluto with the “advantages of continuous integration, verification, and validation of the evolving product, frequent demonstration of progress, early warning of problems, early delivery of subset capabilities, and systematic incorporation of rework that may occur during the software development” (Fairley, 2009, p. 64).

It has been observed that in software development, change is unavoidable and must be accommodated for in the life cycle. A number of alternative process models have been introduced in order to attempt to fix the issues in the Waterfall model. An early modification to the standard Waterfall method introduced prototyping as a feedback and discovery mechanism to identify misunderstandings and omissions early on in the process (Neill, 2004). Other process models attempted to further get rid of the risks of misunderstandings by breaking down projects

Analyze user needs and develop user requirements and convert the requirements to required functionality. ("Systems development life,”)

     Short-term solutions to software can lead to numerous problems.  The number one issue has the IT team trying to diagnose an issue in limited amounts of time.  The software can be complicated to understand thus limiting the amount of time spent on designing the application could result in errors in the processes for the enterprise. Also, short-term operations eliminate the opportunity to reduce cost and increase production times for the organizations.  Ultimately, short-term procedures do not allow the time for real-time decisions as well as the time to develop compatible software.

This approach identifies business and user requirements using Discovery prototyping and Rapid Architected Development by rapid construction of prototypes. The two techniques are discussed as follows;

A new system development cycle brings a process of building a good system with quality. A single incorrect step could create a huge mistake in the development process. Steps of developing a system begin with requirement gathering and analysis; basically brainstorm to check ideas to put into action for development. This could be assembled independently through personal documentation, but a lot of them could be acquired with the user participation through interviews of open-ended questions or a structured questionnaire. Next task is the system analysis to improve decision making in order to define in detail. This is broken down into smaller parts to help make it more manageable to develop, design, and test. A system design gathers

If not considered carefully, these challenges could represent a serious threat to the success of the development process. These challenges include: (1) increased difficulty of time and cost estimation due to vague and ambiguous requirement. (2) The increased of risk choosing inadequate or unsuitable architecture in early stages. (3) Insufficient consideration given to non-functional requirements like maintainability, portability, safety, security, and performance. (4) Lack of customer involvement and participation which can have a very detrimental impact to the success of the project. (5) Focusing too much on business value as a prioritization criteria and neglecting other factors. (6) Requirement verification is not given enough importance. (7) The lack of formal specification documents mainly due to time and budget constraints

This essay is structured in the following way: I start will begin by defining the design problem; then I willshall illustrate sketching and prototyping techniques, what they are, how they can be used to support the design of an interactive system, and their weakness and strengths. The conclusion will highlights how sketching is still an irreplaceable tool for designers, while prototyping helps in simulating reach experiences and technical feasibility. Before proceeding, it is important to define the term designer: Designer is anyone who create sketching or prototyping in order to design, regardless of their job.