An industrial case study of the impact of domain ignorance on the effectiveness of requirements idea generation during requirements elicitation

Abstract

One of the factors that is supposed to have a significant effect on an individual's effectiveness during requirements engineering activities is knowledge of the problem being solved by the system to be built, i.e., domain knowledge. Nevertheless, domain knowledge is a double-edged sword. While in-depth domain knowledge facilitates understanding the details of the problem, in-depth domain knowledge can promote falling for tacit assumptions of the domain and overlooking the obvious. On the other hand, lack of domain knowledge can facilitate more innovative out-of-the-domain-box idea generation. This paper describes a case study carried out in industry of the idea generation part of a requirements idea brainstorming session conducted by a team deliberately constructed with four domain experts supplied by the company participating in the case study and with four domain ignorants supplied by the authors. The results support the conclusion that having a team consisting of a mix of domain experts and domain ignorants improves the effectiveness of the idea generation part of requirements idea brainstorming.