Domain-specific Engineering
Definitions
- Abstraction
- A concept that connotes a family by representing the essential properties that members of that family have in common. (For example, "stack" is a concept that connotes any mechanism whose function is to store a set of objects such that they can be retrieved in last-in/first-out order.) Relative to such a concept, all members of the associated family are indistinguishable and any member would be valid and equally good as an example of that concept.
- Adaptable component
- A unified representation of a family of components that is sufficient to enable mechanical derivation of any instance.
- Business area
- A business focus, corresponding to a coherent market, of an organization that supplies products to customers.
- Coherent market
- A market in which customers have similar needs.
- Commonality
- A property that all members of a family share.
- Component
- A fragment of a work product.
- Customer
- A person or organization responsible for determining the need for, acquiring, and evaluating the adequacy of a product.
- Domain
- The knowledge (product family) and expertise (process) required to build a particular type of product.
- Family
- (1) A set whose members are similar and have a common source.
- (2) In mathematics, a set of functions that can be generated by varying the parameters of a general form. (Webster's New College Dictionary, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1995)
- Market
- The potential customers for some particular type of product.
- Method
- Guidance and criteria that prescribe a systematic, repeatable technique for performing an activity.
- Methodology
- (1) An integrated body of principles, practices, and methods that prescribe the nature and proper performance of a process.
- (2) A family of (similar) processes.
- Model
- A representation of a product or system that is sufficient to provide approximate answers to a designated set of questions about the represented product or system.
- Process
- A partially ordered set of activities or actions, conceived as a means of accomplishing specified objectives.
- Product
- (1) A means, consisting of hardware, software, manual procedures, and information, by which a system can be transformed so as to exhibit particular capabilities or behavior.
- (2) The collection of work products that result from performing a process whose purpose is to satisfy specified needs of a customer.
- Product family
- (1) A set of (potential) products that provide similar solutions to an envisioned set of similar problems.
- (2) The intensional formulation of an abstraction consisting of a unified representation of a set of similar products from which any instance of the set can be identified and mechanically derived.
- Product line
- (1) A set of similar products that have been provided by an organization to customers of a particular business area.
- (2) An extensional formulation of an abstraction, being a set of similar products that have been realized and correspond to instances of the abstraction's intensional formulation (as a product family).
- Similar
- Having certain essential properties in common (commonalities) but differing in others (variabilities).
- Specification
- A complete, precise description of the verifiable properties required of a product or work product.
- Subfamily
- A subset of a family, specifically a set consisting of those members of a family that have certain additional properties in common that are not characteristic of the family as a whole.
- System
- A collection of hardware, software, and people that operate together in an environment to accomplish a particular objective or responsibility.
- Variability
- A property that partitions the members of a family into subfamilies. The complete set of such properties associated with a family are sufficient to distinguish between any two members of the family.
- Work product
- Any retained artifact produced in performing a process.
Many of the above terms are refinements or derive from the glossary of the RSP Guidebook which also defines other related terms of interest.
