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Who is winning in the "Low vs High fidelity prototyping" debate? Should prototype-zero (P0) be the first version of the final product? Or should be P-0 always a throwaway? What approach is the industry favoring?
Excelent article from wikipedia: Software prototyping
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The four common types of prototyping used in the software industry today are: Rapid (Throwaway) prototyping. Evolutionary prototyping. Incremental prototyping.
One disadvantage with throw-away prototyping is that developers may be pressurised by the users to deliver it as a final system! Another issue is that all the man-hours of putting together the throw away prototypes are lost unlike the evolutionary approach.
There are several methods of industrial design prototyping: iterative, parallel, competitive, and rapid. These different methods of prototyping produce varying models of proof-of-concept during the product development process.
A prototype should always be a throwaway - a prototype is used to quickly prove a concept and influence the design of the real product. As such, a lot of things which are important for a real product (a thought-out architecture and design, reliability, security, maintainability, etc.) fall by the wayside. If you do take these things into account when building your prototype, you're not really building a prototype anymore.
My experience with prototypes where the code directly evolved into an actual product shows that the end-result suffers because of it - the lack of a real architecture resulted in a lot of cobbled-together code that had to be constantly hacked to add new features. I've even seen a case the original technology chosen for rapid development of the prototype was not the best choice for the actual product, and a complete re-write was necessary for V2.
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