suppose you were to plan to undertake the development of a product with a large number of technical as well as customer related risks, which life cycle model would you adopt?
Answers
Answer:
Specific Instructional Objectives
At the end of this lesson the student will be able to:
• Explain what a prototype is.
• Explain why and when a prototype needs to be developed during software
development.
• Identify the situations in which one would prefer to build a prototype.
• State the activities carried out during each phase of a spiral model.
• Identify circumstances under which spiral model should be used for
software development.
• Tailor a development process to a specific project.
Prototype
A prototype is a toy implementation of the system. A prototype usually exhibits
limited functional capabilities, low reliability, and inefficient performance
compared to the actual software. A prototype is usually built using several
shortcuts. The shortcuts might involve using inefficient, inaccurate, or dummy
functions. The shortcut implementation of a function, for example, may produce
the desired results by using a table look-up instead of performing the actual
computations. A prototype usually turns out to be a very crude version of the
actual system.
Need for a prototype in software development
There are several uses of a prototype. An important purpose is to illustrate the
input data formats, messages, reports, and the interactive dialogues to the
customer. This is a valuable mechanism for gaining better understanding of the
customer’s needs:
• how the screens might look like
• how the user interface would behave
• how the system would produce outputs
This is something similar to what the architectural designers of a building do; they
show a prototype of the building to their customer. The customer can evaluate
whether he likes it or not and the changes that he would need in the actual
product. A similar thing happens in the case of a software product and its
prototyping model.
Another reason for developing a prototype is that it is impossible to get the
perfect product in the first attempt. Many researchers and engineers advocate
that if you want to develop a good product you must plan to throw away the first
version. The experience gained in developing the prototype can be used to
develop the final product.
Explanation: