Tailoring Architecture Centric Design Method with Rapid Prototyping

Abstract: Many engineering processes exist in the industry, text books and international standards. However, in practice rarely any of the processes are followed consistently and literally. It is observed across industries the processes are altered based on the requirements of the projects. Two features commonly lacking from many engineering processes are, 1) the formal capacity to rapidly develop prototypes in the rudimentary stage of the project, 2) transitioning of requirements into architectural designs, when and how to evaluate designs and how to use the throw away prototypes throughout the system lifecycle. Prototypes are useful for eliciting requirements, generating customer feedback and identifying, examining or mitigating risks in a project where the product concept is at a cutting edge or not fully perceived. Apart from the work that the product is intended to do, systemic properties like availability, performance and modifiability matter as much as functionality. Architects must even these concerns with the method they select to promote these systemic properties and at the same time equip the stakeholders with the desired functionality. Architectural design and prototyping is one of the key ways to build the right product embedded with the desired systemic properties. Once the product is built it can be almost impossible to retrofit the system with the desired attributes. This paper customizes the architecture centric development method with rapid prototyping to achieve the above-mentioned goals and reducing the number of iterations across the stages of ACDM.