What Is Rapid Application Development (RAD)?
If you're looking to speed up your development process, you want RAD. It's not just a slogan—it's a way of life. If you need your product out the door as quickly as possible, RAD is the way to go. It's not just a set of tools or tricks; it's a philosophy emphasizing rapid application development over everything else. And RAD does this. Use existing frameworks and libraries wherever possible instead of building them from scratch. Use prototyping to ensure you're building the right thing before you waste time making it in earnest. Use agile processes like Scrum (which has roots in RAD) to keep things moving without getting stuck in analysis paralysis. RAD is a term that was first used in the 1960s when it was applied to manufacturing. It stood for "rapid application development," meaning that you could build something quickly using off-the-shelf components. But the term has been adopted by software developers, too. In this context, RAD stands for "rapid application development," but with a slightly different meaning. It refers to predefined prototyping techniques and tools to produce software applications. RAD encompasses a graphical user interface (GUI) development environment, allowing end users to quickly drag and drop required software application components. RAD, or Rapid Application Development, is a popular software development methodology that employs various tools and techniques to promptly produce minimally-coded software applications. Essence is prototyping, creating predefined components, structures and methods to develop software models swiftly. RAD was built in the 1980s by Kent Beck while working at IBM. It was initially called the "Spiral Model" but was later renamed "Extreme Programming" (XP). In RAD, programmers work together with business analysts to define what the application should accomplish before writing any code. Once this is done, programmers use one of many RAD frameworks to create a proof of concept prototype. The prototype will be used for user acceptance testing (UAT) and then revised based on feedback from UAT before being released as production-ready code.
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