What Do You Know About Prototyping?

To avoid the potentially expensive disaster that could result from completing every phase of systems development before users every lay their hands on a system, many analysts have advocated prototyping as a means of systems development. In Prototyping the focus is on developing a small model, or prototype, of the overall system. Users work with the prototype and suggest modifications.

The prototype is then enhanced. As soon as the prototype is refined to the point where higher management feels confident that a larger version of the system will succeed, either the prototype can be expanded into the final system or the organization can go full steam ahead with the remaining steps of systems development. In prototyping analysis and design generally proceed together in small steps that finally result in a completed system.
The idea behind the prototyping process is virtually identical to the developing vacations plans.

Protyping is highly applicable in situations where user needs are hard to pin down, the system must be developed quickly, and some experimentation is necessary to avoid building the wrong system. Prototyping is a systems development alternative whereby a small model, or prototype, of the system is built before a full scale systems development effort is undertaken.

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Prototyping is can be defined as a process of building a model of any system. If we talk about an information system, the prototypes are employed to help and assist the system designers build an information system that intuitive and easy to manipulate for end users. Prototyping is basically an iterative process that is part of the analysis phase of the systems development life cycle.


During the requirements determination section of the systems analysis phase, system analysts collect information about the organization's existing procedures and business processes related the proposed information system. They also study the current information system, if there is one, and conduct user interviews to collect documentation. This helps the analysts build up an initial set of system requirements


Prototyping can enhance this process as it converts these basic, yet occasionally intangible, specifications into a tangible but limited working model of the required information system. The feedback of user gained from developing a physical system that the users can touch and see facilitates an evaluative response that the analyst can employ to adjust existing requirements as well as developing new ones. Prototyping comes in several forms - from low teach sketches or paper screens to high teach operational systems using CASE (computer-aided software engineering) or fourth generation languages (4 GL) and everywhere in between.

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