I’m from the manufacturing industry at the moment and work daily with rapid prototyping. It’s an over-arching term to describe a set of techniques for creating something quickly with which to evaluate your ideas. Typically it’s used to create a prototype while avoiding the investment of tooling.

In software I see this being applicable in something such as UX design. You could sketch up a basic interface with the absolute minimal functionality to present the concept and evaluate it. You should be able to do a dozen of these “rapid prototypes” in the time it would take to make a single fully functional “alpha” interface.

I see the point of your post, but I like the term “rapid prototyping” better than “a slightly faster and better way to test our ideas than previously”.