Evaluating ‘Throw Away’ Prototyping for Requirements Capture

This paper demonstrates the advantages of extending the scope of prototyping to the requirements capture phase of a project. Prototyping has long been used to elicit users’ responses to ready-formed designs (Boehm, 1988), but only recently has the use of concept demonstrators (Sanderson, 1997) and early throw-away prototypes (Smith et al., 1990) been suggested as a means to capture response to alternative design options, before any design has been agreed, and with the intention that some of them will never be developed. We show that this is not only practicable, but actually cost-effective.