Question

What is the effect of designing a prototype on the overall cost of the software project?

Answer 1

Two frequent questions we get asked at Fluid UI is what the benefit of software prototyping is, and whether it is a more or less effective approach to gathering software requirements when compared with other more traditional approaches.

We've investigated much of the published research relating to companies that use prototyping focused requirements gathering practices. When combined, these show a definitive increase in project success when prototyping is used. In addition, by piecing together the reports and studies and related materials, we can make some useful estimates around the efficiency gains associated with prototyping - plenty to make the case that every software project needs to use prototyping as an approach, and that the benefits far outweigh the cost.

Banging on the wall

It's not hard to find someone in the software development field who knows and understands the effectiveness of prototyping but doesn't have access to the hard data that backs up their wisdom. Once a project is complete, no company is going to go back and redo a project just to provide a suitable data point. Similarly, setting up a controlled academic test of a suitably complex piece of software is also prohibitively expensive. To date, we've had little to back up our instincts except “it’s just better - trust me” - an answer which can result in less technically inclined project stakeholders expressing concerns about whether the time and cost needed to create a prototype can be justified.

The research we've summarised below will at last put this concern to rest. But let's start with a simple question.

What are the costs of poor software processes?

The cost of fixing issues at the various stages of the software development life cycle is well known and documented. It’s a classic hockey stick shaped graph that any investor or financial wizard would die for (but sadly in our case, could result in the death of our project, or in the worst of cases, the firing of your entire 200 person team).