Domain Engineering:⋆ A “Radical Innovation ” for Software and Systems Engineering? A Biased Account⋆⋆

Abstract. Some facts: Before software and computing systems can be developed, their requirements must be reasonably well under-stood. Before requirements can be finalised the application domain, as it is, must be fairly well understood. Some opinions: In today’s software and computing systems devel-opment very little, if anything is done, we claim, to establish fair understandings of the domain. It simply does not suffice, we further claim, to record assumptions about the domain when recording re-quirements. Far more radical theories of application domains must be at hand before requirements development is even attempted. In this presentation we advocate a strong rôle for domain engineer-ing. We argue that domain descriptions are far more stable than are requirements prescriptions for support of one or another set of do-main activities. We further argue, that once, given extensive domain descriptions, it is comparatively faster to establish trustworthy and stable requirements than it is today. We finally argue that once we have a sufficient (varietal) collection of domain specific, ie. related, albeit distinct, requirements, we can develop far more reusable soft-ware components than using current approaches. ⋆ This paper was first drafted in connection with a US DoDWorkshop held at Venezia