An Empirical investigation into management and control of software prototyping.

Abstract

In response to the so-called "software crisis', software prototyping has been widely used as a technique in various stage of systems development since the late 70's, and, with the growing sophistication of 4GLs tools and environments, it has becoming a popular alternative to conventional development approaches. A study of the literature revealed that, unlike tools and environments, the management and control of software prototyping practice has been widely reported as being problematic. The study also suggested that there were very few reported studies of prototyping projects in practice. In order to contribute to the understanding of the management and control of prototyping, it was therefore decided to conduct an empirical study. The empirical investigation comprises three interrelated stages: preliminary survey, field modelling and semi structured interviews. The findings of each stage provided inputs and formed a base for the following stage. From the survey to practitioners it became apparent that the concerns of the literature, regarding the management and control of prototyping projects, were justified. The next stage involved a detailed study using process modelling techniques of ten prototyping projects at eight software development organisations. This was then followed up by semi structured interviews of managers and prototypers at five organisations. In addition a number of documents, minutes and standards were also analysed, and personality tests conducted. The main lessons learnt include the 'process diversity', the inadequate methods and standards, and lack of quality control, particularly in regard to future maintainability and extensibility. Recommendations are given for each key management and control area identified, including team selection, initial requirement gathering, prototypes building, change requests and quality controls. Finally the thesis concludes that further work should be extended to areas such as developing 'lean methods' and an easy to use toolset for better management and control of the process.