Architectures of Prototypes and Architectural Prototyping

Abstract

This paper reports from experience obtained through development of a prototype of a global customer service system in a project involving a large shipping company and a university research group. The research group had no previous knowledge of the complex business of shipping and had never worked together as a team, but developed a prototype that more than fulfilled the expectations of the shipping company. The prototype should:

• complete the first major phase within 10 weeks,
• be highly vertical illustrating future work practice,
• continuously live up to new requirements from prototyping sessions with users,
• evolve over a long period of time to contain more functionality
• allow for 6-7 developers working intensively in parallel.

Explicit focus on the software architecture and letting the architecture evolve with the prototype played a major role in resolving these conflicting constraints. Specifically allowing explicit restructuring phases when the architecture became problematic showed to be crucial.

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