Virtual multi-user software prototypes III

Abstract

In design thinking and software engineering, prototypes play a crucial role in validating insights, needs and requirements. Still, the effort necessary to create these prototypes depends on multiple factors such as the number of people involved with the design thinking project. Especially for multi-user software systems, the effort of creating validation artifacts is too high to be feasible for multiple iterations, thus, inhibiting design thinkers to inexpensively try different ideas early and often. To overcome this problem, we investigated the usability and feasibility of virtual prototypes - animated simulations of formal models which can be derived automatically without additional costs. This paper reports on our advances during the 3 years of the design thinking research project concerned with Virtual Multi-User Software Prototypes.