From LQWiki

RAD, or Rapid application development, is a growing movement in the computer world to reduce development timelines. Rapid Developed projects often use openly or commerically available packages to rapidly meet their customer's demands, and ideally "connect the dots" between the packages. However, since many concerns, such as package cost, license agreements, and package availability exist, Rapid Application Development has far from reached its plateua and many "rapid" developed projects have timelines of 9 months to 2 years.

In many cases, most famously in the many efficiency tests of the Visual Basic language, Rapid Application Development technology has accomplished a drop in development time at the expense of computational efficiency.