Breaking with Tradition: Using Rapid Prototyping In The Software Engineering Course

One approach to the development of software, which has received considerable attention in the software engineering literature, is rapid prototyping. We describe the rapid prototyping methodology and discuss some of its advantages and disadvantages. We then focus on the use of rapid prototyping in the project component of the typical undergraduate software engineering course. Several approaches to prototyping are described, along with various automated tools that support prototyping. Our experiences with prototyping in our undergraduate software engineering course are described, and we draw a number of conclusions vis a vis the use of prototyping.