Answer
Rapid application development (RAD) techniques emphasize extensive user involvement in the rapid and evolutionary construction of working prototypes of a system to accelerate the system development process.
It has the following merits and demerits.
Merits
• As customer is involved at all stages of development it leads to a product achieving customer satisfaction.
• Feedback from the customer/user is available at the initial stages
• Development time of the product may be reduced due to use of powerful development tools.
• Quick initial views of the product are possible
• It reuses existing program components
• It makes the effective use of off-the-shelf tools and frameworks.
Demerits
• Highly specialized and skilled developers are required and such developers may not be available very easily
• Model is ineffective if system cannot be properly modularized.
• Absence of reusable components can lead to failure of the project.
• There is a risk of never achieving closure. The project manager must work closely with both the development team and customer to avoid an infinite loop.