The Principles of Rapid Application Development
John Watkins · 2009
In certain situations, a usable 80% solution can be produced in 20% of the time that would have been required to produce a total solution. Walter Maner Introduction This appendix reviews the essential rules and practices of the Rapid Application Development (RAD) agile method, focusing in more detail on the testing aspects of the method. The guiding principles of RAD are to deliver usable high-quality systems quickly and with low costs. The RAD rules and practices are discussed under the following sections: Overview of the Characteristics of RAD Projects, Joint Application Design, Rapidity of Development, and Incremental Prototyping. Overview of the Characteristics of RAD Projects RAD seeks to avoid the traditional problems associated with large, monolithic waterfall-style projects by breaking the organization and management of the project tasks into smaller, more easily managed increments. Historically, RAD projects have been most successful when employed to develop relatively small and simple applications, with low complexity and risk. For larger, more complex applications, such as the implementation of a company-wide customer relationship management (CRM) system, for example, organizations typically looked to more mature software project management and development approaches (such as PRINCE [22]). A number of organizations have had success combining both approaches, with PRINCE used for the overall management of the project and RAD employed to develop the comparatively simple and low-complexity applications that run against (using our preceding example) the CRM system.