Abstract
The mechanism of prototype development is considered by the research and industrial software communities as a key tool for user-developer communication. In software development, prototypes are used in requirements engineering to help elicit and validate users’ needs. Software prototypes like mockups are frequently considered throwaway artefacts and therefore they are often developed very fast, or with very few resources and discarded. In this paper we propose to change this idea, and to create prototypes that can be reused in any model-driven engineering (MDE) process. The paper presents an approach for an automatic mechanism for translating prototype models into requirements models and its implementation in a suitable tool case. This way, software developer teams will be able to dedicate resources to improving communication with users using prototypes because the knowledge acquired will be automatically transferred to the requirements phase of the development process.
Paper Type
Short Paper
Don’t Throw your Software Prototypes Away. Reuse them!
The mechanism of prototype development is considered by the research and industrial software communities as a key tool for user-developer communication. In software development, prototypes are used in requirements engineering to help elicit and validate users’ needs. Software prototypes like mockups are frequently considered throwaway artefacts and therefore they are often developed very fast, or with very few resources and discarded. In this paper we propose to change this idea, and to create prototypes that can be reused in any model-driven engineering (MDE) process. The paper presents an approach for an automatic mechanism for translating prototype models into requirements models and its implementation in a suitable tool case. This way, software developer teams will be able to dedicate resources to improving communication with users using prototypes because the knowledge acquired will be automatically transferred to the requirements phase of the development process.
Recommended Citation
Escalona, M. J., García-Borgoñón, L., & Koch, N (2021). Don’t Throw your Software Prototypes Away. Reuse them!. In E. Insfran, F. González, S. Abrahão, M. Fernández, C. Barry, H. Linger, M. Lang, & C. Schneider (Eds.), Information Systems Development: Crossing Boundaries between Development and Operations (DevOps) in Information Systems (ISD2021 Proceedings). Valencia, Spain: Universitat Politècnica de València.