The Perils of Prototyping

I just finished a first version of a presentation/paper on the trade offs between light weight methods and heavy methods. The light weight method is based on using an object oriented language, CRC card type discover process, and a large number of iterations between discover, build, validate. The heavy method is based on my experience with Clean room. I have not monitored enough Agile/Scrum/XP projects to capture the metrics specifically for those but it will likely fall fairly close to the OO experiences. In my Scrum Master training one of the jobs the Scrum Master performed was to insulate the smallish (4-7 developers) team from the customers. The Product Owner is the only regular contact the team has with the rest of the organization. As you can see in the paper (Go to my website and look in the papers section) my assertion is that prototypic development (and i will bet Agile as well) fails because of too many customers and developers participating in the release.