An Industrial Experience in Improving the Software Process Through Domain Analysis

Nowadays software applications are present everywhere and producing them is a hard task: software firms are facing an increasing demand for new applications with higher quality and lower prices, but it is often difficult to exploit this business chance. This paper presents a case study regarding the adoption of domain analysis inside a software firm with the purpose to improve the software process and to introduce software reuse practices. Domain analysis is the process of identifying, collecting, and organising all the artefacts used in software development in a particular domain with the goal to make them reusable. This methodology proposes to enhance the software process of a firm, augmenting productivity, reducing time to market and improving the quality of the delivered products. The case study took place in a real industrial project, integrating the software development process of the organisation with the new practices coming from the introduction of domain analysis. We discuss the results we collected through the measuring program that we set up to monitor the experiment 638 execution. The evaluation we made and the quantitative figures we obtained shows that domain analysis, and reuse practices that it fosters, can take real benefits to the organisation. In the last section of this paper, we investigate the implications that the experiment had in the organisation and we describe future actions