So what’s ur prototyping tool like?

At the BBC I know some departments use an open source homegrown prototyping framework called kamaelia, http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net. It contains a lot of very useful high level concurrent components written in python. Very reminiscent of, yip u guessed it, erlang’s otp.

Abdel

A checklist is an interesting proposition, even if it serves as a basic reminder. However, it does really depend on the situation and experience is really the key.

Maybe, even start on the real thing and if things aren’t working out, you could back track and build a quick prototype. Actually, I find tracer bullets to be of super help in situations like that.

Abdel

One of the best thing my company did was build an internal rapid prototyping tool. It’s not so relevant if you’re a lone wolf but the more guys on your team, the more likely it is to earn its keep.

Good article (found via @craigwebster’s Twitter response to you, in case you’re wondering).

In the real world, you always have to adapt to the situation, so your “Don’t Do It” paragraph makes sense, but at the same time, due to programmer optimism, most people will end up not prototyping because they feel that it won’t take much longer to build the real thing anyway (no matter how false that might be).

I guess it takes experience and some self-discipline to know how and when to write throw-away code. It would be useful to have some objective criteria/checklist to help programmers decide in a less subjective way, whether the code they’re about to write should be a prototype or the real thing.

Thanks for the article!