Software Sketchifying: Bringing Innovation into Software Development

Inspired by general ideas about how the automotive industry brings innovation into lean manufacturing, the author proposes introducing an activity called software sketchifying into software product development. Sketchifying aims to stimulate software stakeholders to spend more time generating and considering alternative ideas before making a decision to proceed with engineering. To support this exploration activity, Sketchlet is a flexible tool that empowers nonengineers to work with emerging software and hardware technologies, explore their possibilities, and create working examples—called sketchlets—that incorporate these emerging technologies. Software sketchifying´s main output is a set of realistic proposals for new software solutions that give the engineering process a clear focus and goal. The author also presents some lessons learned in applying this idea and tool in several projects.