When I was growing up, being heavily involved with computers, I naturally dabbled in programming, and being a self-proclaimed gamer, I liked to code games. The only people who ever saw these games were my brothers and sisters, who also tested them pretty extensively. If they found something that didn't work, wanted an extra feature, or had an idea for further development, they could just tell the coder, who was probably sitting right next to them while they played. Then I could code the new part, compile it, and they would be trying it out in a matter of minutes.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was using Rapid Application Development (RAD). This approach allowed the users (my siblings) to directly communicate to the developer (me) any kind of feedback they wanted, and then see it implemented almost instantly. It worked well for us working on such a small project with only one developer and a limited number of users, but I can see how it could get pretty confusing as you scale up the number of users and developers.
My other concern with RAD would be coding standards. When any large company codes a project, all the coding must be done to their coding standards regarding use of inline functions, comments, function headers, and so forth. The rapid aspect of RAD could make this hard to maintain, as coders quickly modify things or add functions without the proper formatting. However, if this was kept under close surveillance and rigorously enforced, I see no reason why RAD could not become an industry standard.
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