Today, in implementation discussions, we hear the terms prototyping and modeling used interchangeably to describe experimentation. However, I believe that these are separate activities with different objectives, and should be performed at different points of time within a packaged software implementation. Both prototyping and business solution modeling support key requirements management activities.
Requirements management consists of three key activities:
1. Requirements gathering
2. Requirements analysis
3. Requirements validation
Prototyping focuses on facilitating requirements gathering, and business solution modeling focuses on requirements validation and impact analysis. We will discuss both of these activities in greater detail.