The emergence of rapid prototyping as a real-time software development tool

Recent years have seen an explosion in the demand for high quality software. The complexity and size of these projects has also increased. Software developers have been forced to recognise the shortcomings of conventional methods for producing software. As new methods for controlling and managing production have emerged, researchers have emphasised the importance of the system specification. The task of constructing the system specification involves a great deal of communication between the developers and the clients. The use of specialised technical language by both parties makes precise exchange of ideas difficult. There is thus a need for both parties to be able to explore a commonly agreed definition of the problem. This requires a method of presenting the problem definition which is easily understood by both parties. The use of rapid prototyping is one approach to solving this problem and the authors discuss its use as a software development tool