Today, software needs to be developed quickly and set to production. Prototyping can help to improve efficiency in the development process. However, it is important to think carefully about which prototyping method fits your project. Software development is a very dynamic discipline in which requirements change quickly. Often, the client page develops several requirements or user stories, although it cannot accurately estimate the corresponding result. The development team is concerned and working on a representative stakeholder. However, if this falls short of expectations because the system for visualizing initial requirements is missing, such a project may have to be completely relaunched.
A prototype in software development can help keep software projects on track and complete them quickly. This factor for a software development company results in an increased budget for product development. To optimize the process and accordingly the budget, different approaches can be pursued: POC (Proof of Concept), Wireframes, Functional Prototyping, MVP (Minimum Viable Product) or a pilot project.
Prototyping and safety
In the case of evolutionary prototyping, the prototype will form the basis for the production-ready system. This is good from a budgetary point of view, but it could be problematic from a security point of view. Depending on the security issues, two situations occur:
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- In the case of safety problems which are easy to solve and do not constitute architectural problems, they may be rectified retrospectively if the prototype is agreed with the client and the product is moved to the next stages.
- In the case of architectural security issues, where some parts of the system need to be redesigned, this concerns both the budget and the timetable of the project. To avoid this, either disposable prototypes could be used (because they are faster to implement) and could be used for the production-ready design of the system with a view to the Security, or the prototype with a safety view, even if it is more time consuming during the prototyping phase.
Conclusion
Depending on the organizational structure and architectural design of the product, prototyping in its various shapes can be used as a powerful tool to reduce the time and cost of refinement the requirements and coordinate them with the client. However, developers need to think carefully about software architecture, software principles, and security threats. These developments need to be integrated into prototype development before this approach is further developed into a production-ready product. The more complex the product is to become, the more expensive and time-consuming the solution of the tasks becomes.
