Rapid Application Development

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does Rapid Application Development Mean?

Rapid application development (RAD) is a suite of software development methodology techniques used to expedite software application development.

Advertisements

RAD uses predefined prototyping techniques and tools to produce software applications. It encompasses a graphical user interface (GUI) development environment, allowing end users to easily drag and drop required software application components.

Software RAD techniques employ computer-aided software engineering (CASE).

Techopedia Explains Rapid Application Development

RAD is a popular software development methodology employing various tools and techniques to quickly produce minimally-coded software applications. RAD’s essence is prototyping – creating predefined components, structures and methods to quickly develop software models.

RAD’s working software prototypes lack full-scale functionality. They are used primarily for demonstration and requirement gathering, which helps end users envision entire solution stacks. RAD contains built-in and customizeable data, processes and organizational models. Thus, it employs a model-driven and object-oriented approach to developing complete solutions.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.