AN APPLICATION OF DECISION-THEORY FOR THE EVALUATION OF SOFTWARE PROTOTYPES

There is a need to quantify management decision making in software development. To this end, this article presents an application of concepts from economic decision theory to an aspect of this problem currently under study by many in the software engineering community-how to prototype a design and evaluate the effectiveness of this prototype. The role of prototyping as an experimental tool is analyzed and techniques for defining what to prototype and when it is cost effective are introduced. We demonstrate some of these decision theory techniques to define a model that management can use to select solutions from a set of alternative designs.