The Effect of Department Size on Developer Attitudes to Prototyping

Abstract

We survey software practitioners' perceptions of the prototyping and waterfall approaches and find that department size has a significant effect on their attitudes to the advantages and disadvantages of the approaches.Overall respondents from small departments prefer a prototyping approach, respondents from medium sized departments prefer a waterfall approach, while respondents from large departments are more aware of the benefits of both approaches.However, until a mature controlled software development process is in place all the benefits provided by these software development approaches are unlikely to be perceived.