software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

, domain analysis, or product line analysis, is the process of analyzing related

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

systems in a

domain Domain may refer to: Mathematics *Domain of a function, the set of input values for which the (total) function is defined **Domain of definition of a partial function **Natural domain of a partial function **Domain of holomorphy of a function * Do ...

to find their common and variable parts. It is a model of wider business context for the system. The term was coined in the early 1980s by James Neighbors. Domain analysis is the first phase of

domain engineering Domain engineering, is the entire process of reusing domain knowledge in the production of new software systems. It is a key concept in systematic code reuse, software reuse and product line engineering. A key idea in systematic software reuse is th ...

. It is a key method for realizing systematic

software reuse In software development (and computer programming in general), code reuse, also called software reuse, is the use of existing software, or software knowledge, to build new software, following the reusability principles. Code reuse may be achiev ...

. Domain analysis produces

domain model In software engineering, a domain model is a conceptual model of the domain that incorporates both behavior and data.Fowler, Martin. ''Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture''. Addison Wesley, 2003, p. 116. In ontology engineering, a do ...

s using methodologies such as

domain specific languages A domain-specific language (DSL) is a computer language specialized to a particular application domain. This is in contrast to a general-purpose language (GPL), which is broadly applicable across domains. There are a wide variety of DSLs, ranging ...

, ''feature tables'', ''facet tables'', ''facet templates'', and ''generic architectures'', which describe all of the

system A system is a group of Interaction, interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment (systems), environment, is described by its boundaries, ...

s in a domain. Several methodologies for domain analysis have been proposed. The products, or "artifacts", of a domain analysis are sometimes

object-oriented model Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of " objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of p ...

s (e.g. represented with the

Unified Modeling Language The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. The creation of UML was originally m ...

(UML)) or

data model A data model is an abstract model that organizes elements of data and standardizes how they relate to one another and to the properties of real-world entities. For instance, a data model may specify that the data element representing a car be co ...

s represented with entity-relationship diagrams (ERD).

Software developer Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, Computer programming, programming, software documentation, documenting, software testing, testing, and Software bugs, bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applic ...

s can use these models as a basis for the implementation of

software architecture Software architecture is the fundamental structure of a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements and relations. ...

s and applications. This approach to domain analysis is sometimes called

model-driven engineering Model-driven engineering (MDE) is a software development methodology that focuses on creating and exploiting domain models, which are conceptual models of all the topics related to a specific problem. Hence, it highlights and aims at abstract re ...

. In

information science Information science (also known as information studies) is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, Categorization, classification, manipulation, storage, information retrieval, retrieval, movement, dissemin ...

, the term "domain analysis" was suggested in 1995 by

Birger Hjørland Birger Hjørland (born January 1, 1947 in Denmark) is a professor of knowledge organization at the Royal School of Library and Information Science (RSLIS) in Copenhagen. His main areas of study pertain to theory of library and information science an ...

and H. Albrechtsen.Birger Hjørland's definition of domain analysis

Domain analysis techniques

Several domain analysis techniques have been identified, proposed and developed due to the diversity of goals, domains, and involved processes. * DARE: Domain Analysis and Reuse Environmen

* Feature-Oriented Domain Analysis (FOD

* IDEF0 for Domain Analysi

* Model Oriented Domain Analysis and Engineerin

Domain analysis techniques

References

See also