Rapid Prototyping Model
Rapid prototyping emphasizes requirements, analysis, and validation, also called:
- customer oriented development,
- evolutionary prototyping
Rapid prototyping models are essential for identifying design flaws and gaining valuable feedback during the design process. Functional rapid prototyping models allow product designers and engineers to see how their designs look and function in real world situations. And using rapid prototyping models allows product companies to win new business, develop better products and improve production planning. But in order to be truly effective for functional testing and other applications, engineers need to create multiple iteration of rapid prototyping models, and they need to be able to create them quickly and inexpensively.
Reasons why Rapid Prototyping should be preferred are as follows:
- To increase effective communication
- To decrease development time
- To decrease costly mistakes
- To minimize sustaining engineering changes
- To extend product lifetime by adding necessary features and eliminating redundant features early in the design.
- Reduces risk of incorrect user requirements
- Good where requirements are changing/uncommitted
- Regular visible progress aids management
- Supports early product marketing
Rapid Prototyping decreases development time by allowing corrections to a product to be made early in the process. By giving engineering, manufacturing, marketing, and purchasing a look at the product early in the design process, mistakes can be corrected and changes can be made while they are still inexpensive. The trends in manufacturing industries continue to emphasize the following:
- Increasing number of variants of products.
- Increasing product complexity.
- Decreasing product lifetime before obsolescence.
- Decreasing delivery time
Rapid Prototyping improves product development by enabling better communication in a concurrent engineering environment.
Disadvantages:
1. An unstable/ badly implemented prototype often becomes the final product.
2. Requires extensive customer collaboration
Costs customers money
– Needs committed customers
– Difficult to finish if customer withdraws
– May be too customer specific, no broad market
3. Difficult to know how long project will last
4. Easy to fall back into code-and-fix without proper requirements analysis, design, customer evaluation and feedback.
