Efficient and systematic software evolution through domain analysis

The goal of any domain-analysis approach is to identify and document requirements on a set of systems in the same application domain in order to make development and maintenance activities more efficient. Experience in domain analysis often reports on valuable results with respect to requirements on a company's system family but, on the other hand, it is seen as an effort-intensive approach, which may consequently be seen as not economically useful for software development today. In this paper, however, we describe experience with an approach towards domain analysis that tries to overcome this general problem by systematically coordinating domain analysis effort and necessary product (family) evolution activities. The result was the realization of a web interface to an existing system family as well as a significant improvement of the existing software's usability, flexibility, and maintainability.