Prototyping: The New Paradigm for Systems Development

TLDR

Systems development in the 1980s was identified by MIS executives and academics as a critical issue, with concerns over user accessibility, cost, delay, developer productivity, and organizational impact, and prototyping—common in hardware but not software—was frequently cited as a potential solution. The paper proposes that adopting prototyping for information systems development can address these key challenges and will generate new research questions for the future. The authors review existing literature on prototyping, synthesize a process model for information systems, enumerate resource requirements, analyze its economics, and illustrate the approach with several examples.

Abstract

Leading MIS executives and academicians have identified systems development as one of the most critical issues of the 1980s. Their concerns include providing user accessibility to stored information, reducing development cost and delay, increasing developer productivity and increasing MIS's impact on organizational growth, productivity, and profitability. Among the number of proposed alternative approaches to traditional systems development, prototyping is mentioned frequently. Prototyping is routine in hardware development but not software. The authors review published references to prototyping and related concepts, and synthesize a process model for information systems. In this model, resource requirements are enumerated and discussed. The article includes an analysis of the economics of prototyping, and a brief discussion of several examples. Prototyping for information systems development addresses today's critical issues: it will no doubt raise a new set of research questions for tomorrow.