Professional development/Design thinking/Software prototyping and tools

Many of us (TAs/PMs and students) struggle with the concept of testing software or just how to prototype software. It is less concrete than physical prototyping and is harder to wrap your head around. You might say that you can’t test or can’t prototype something because it is software...think again!

We’ll compare it to a typical mechanical design cycle (not considering client involvement):

Design step	Mechanical	Software
Conceptual designs	Hand/computer drawn sketches	Hand/computer drawn sketches
Preliminary design	Rough CAD assemblies	Wireframe designs/flowchart
Detailed design	Fully defined CAD	High fidelity mockup/Initial coded software
Simulation/testing	CAD force/fluid simulations	UX simulation
Prototype 1	Manufactured part(s)	Functional coded software
Refined testing	Testing under load against metrics	Sub functions to test behavior of specific features against metrics

Here is a list of tools for software prototyping that could be useful: https://blog.prototypr.io/top-20-prototyping-tools-for-ui-and-ux-designers-2017-46d59be0b3a9

In our GNG1103/2101 classes the cycle looks a little differently where you might have:

Design step	Mechanical	Software
Conceptual designs	Hand drawn sketches	Hand drawn sketches
Detailed design	Detailed sketches of sub-assemblies with some analysis	Wireframe designs/flowchart
Prototype 1	Cardboard prototype	High fidelity mockup/Initial coded software
Simulation/testing	Functional testing of prototype against metrics	UX simulation against metrics
Prototype 2/3	Assembled and functional prototype	Functional software

Sharing

When working in a team you will definitely want to share your files to work on things together. In mechanical GrabCad Workbench is a popular tool but in software GitHub is definitely an industry standard.

Here is an introduction to GitHub https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/