Architectures of Prototypes and Architectural Prototyping – The Dragon Experience

This paper reports from experience obtained through development of a prototype of a global customer service system in a project involving a large shipping company and a university research group. The research group had no previous knowledge of the complex business of shipping and had never worked together as a team, but developed a prototype that more than fulfilled the expectations of the shipping company. The prototype should: • complete the first major phase within 10 weeks, • be highly vertical illustrating future work practice, • continuously live up to new requirements from prototyping sessions with users, • evolve over a long period of time to contain more functionality • allow for 6-7 developers working intensively in parallel. Explicit focus on the software architecture and letting the architecture evolve with the prototype played a major role in resolving these conflicting constraints. Specifically allowing explicit restructuring phases when the architecture became problematic showed to be crucial.