SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
quickly as well while allowing the component to perfectly fit into a fully
operational system easily.
7. A Waterfall or Spiral process Model will help inexperienced developers to be on
track and be aware of the project milestones.
RAD model specifics:
i. Less time is in hand to deliver a project.
ii. The cost saving is an important part of the project. The model does that by
developing quick prototypes.
iii. The model requires very few members to complete a project.
iv. Measuring the project progress is a part if deliverable.
v. If all the requirements are clear then RAD model is a very effective
methodology.
vi. Users are considered as a significant part of the project.
Challenges:
i. RAD model often misses many points as there is no specific software
requirement collection method which creates comprise that project staff has to
adapt for quicker software development (Alshamrani and Bahattab 2015).
ii. The team performs based on the response speed of the user feedback. If the
user gets confused, then the whole project will get paused.
As per the current growth in the industry and the exhaustive competition for getting better
hold in the market, the organizations do not get a lot of time to implement something every
time they want to change organization structure. The organization may want to implement a
subsystem in any of the department or an application for short time purpose. For these kind of
implementation minimum time of provided to the development team. The RAD or rapid
action development approach becomes the most suitable solution. The RAD model is best
suited for the development where end users are known and can be asked to participate in the
development project. Taken as an example, the staff of a particular department can take part
in the project by sharing the review against the developed prototypes. The waterfall model
can be thought of an alternative to RAD model but die to short time allocated to the project
the project team does not get enough time to gather and verify requirements. That is why the
dynamic projects are completed using the RAD models. Organizations often use the LEAN
development approach as an alternative of RAD. The reason is that LEAN is less costly.
However, the quality of the project gets lower due to utilization of the LEAN model.
Different projects are based on different situation, requirements and business needs.
Table 1: A Comparison of SDLC models
Characteristics RAD Spiral Incremental Waterfall
Requirement Time boxed
release
Beginning Beginning Beginning
Planning Not require Yes Yes Yes
Documentation Not necessary Yes Yes Yes
Handle large
project
Not necessary Yes Not necessary Not necessary
User
involvement
At beginning
only
High Intermediate At beginning
only
Returning to
early phase
Yes Yes Yes No
3

BSc Computing (Information Systems): Software Engineering Report