Domain Engineering - Purpose

Purpose

Domain engineering is designed to improve the quality of developed software products through reuse of software artifacts. Domain engineering shows that most developed software systems are not new systems but rather variants of other systems within the same field. As a result, through the use of domain engineering, businesses can maximize profits and reduce time-to-market by using the concepts and implementations from prior software systems and applying them to the target system. The reduction in cost is evident even during the implementation phase. One study showed that the use of domain-specific languages allowed code size, in both number of methods and number of symbols, to be reduced by over 50%, and the total number of lines of code to be reduced by nearly 75%.

Domain engineering focuses on capturing knowledge gathered during the software engineering process. By developing reusable artifacts, components can be reused in new software systems at low cost and high quality. Because this applies to all phases of the software development cycle, domain engineering also focuses on the three primary phases: analysis, design, and implementation, paralleling application engineering. This produces not only a set of software implementation components relevant to the domain, but also reusable and configurable requirements and designs.