Role of the development methodology and prototyping within capstone projects

A significant challenge in the design of capstone courses is relationship between process and product. As academics we argue that a strong process will result in a good product but instructors face little direction in the identification of a suitable process. A major issue is that of systematically incorporating prototypes into the software design and development lifecycle. In this paper we have identified a development framework which successfully does that integration. This framework was developed from exemplar projects and provides a best system framework. The framework is also used to explore the development process of weaker projects.