ABSTRACT
Most industries benefit from hastened decision making through the use of additional input data. Whether in the form of consumer marketing surveys for usability or actual physical test cases falling over on a test desk, prototyping is used to more rapidly inform ourselves of needed design decisions. As engineers and scientists, the adoption of rapid prototyping as a method of informing software design and deployment should not surprise us. This chapter will lay out the reasoning as to why and when prototyping will save both time and headaches in the design process, especially within the realm of scientific software development. It will also present a few possible prototyping workflows.
