Prototyping in industrial software projects-bridging the gap between theory and practice

Prototyping has been adopted as a technique in software engineering. There has been a lack of documented experience with the use of prototyping in industrial software production. The present work tries to close this gap by presenting an analysis of results obtained from case studies of industrial software projects in which explicit use of prototypes was made with a differing understanding of the underlying concepts. The major concern was to analyze the experience gained in the projects and the major pitfalls in the use of prototyping and, in particular, to juxtapose these pros or cons and the claims made for prototyping in the literature. The analysis is not limited to success stories because understanding the limits and problems of prototyping will help to make full use of the obvious advantages