Modelling the Application Domains of Software Engineering Technologies

The effectiveness of software engineering technologies depends very much on the situation in which they are applied. In order to further improve software development practices we need to investigate and document the application domains of technologies. A first step toward a deeper understanding is to develop an appropriate modelling formalism that allows us to explicitly describe our current knowledge and to utilize the knowledge within software engineer-ing research and practice. This paper suggests a modelling formalism for describing application domains of software engineering technologies. It relies on established techniques from soft-ware domain analysis and software engineering measurement. A lifecycle pro-cess for acquisition and use of technology domain models is presented. The models can be used for supporting systematic reuse of technologies during planning of software projects and improvement programmes.