An Interdisciplinary View on Prototypes - Towards Executable Models That Can Be Evolved Collectively

Among other ideas, putting the user at the center of collaboration is one of the main ideas in the agile software development paradigm. This session will focus on the psychological and social implications that arise from this idea before transitioning to its technical implications, especially targeting prototypes. Ideally, architecture, being such a fundamental property of software, should shape prototypes. Due to various requirements and software development not yet being utopian, it often happens the other way round: prototypical thinking shapes the software and hence its architecture, at the worst resulting in evolutionary prototypes with close to no or - at its best - ad-hoc architecture. Aligned with Agile meets Architecture's core idea, in this session findings out of psychology, social science and software engineering are combined to rethink current practices and inspire, based upon what already is and what could be possible in the next few years. In this sense, imagine requirements analysis through creating interactive documents of user stories that constitute executable code, imagine validating these requirements with prototypes derived from actual business logic or imagine pair programming directly with domain experts.