“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them”. Henry David Thoreau
This third article about Software Quality is concerned with syntactics, by which I mean the syntax of collaborating components and systems, and the people that use them.
Many people involved in software development understand their business domain – i.e. they have business or domain knowledge. This is, for the most part, a good thing, for it means that they can have reasonable confidence that they share syntax and semantics with other stakeholders.
However, there are two common issues related to domain knowledge that bear some discussion. The first is the assumption that if we have sufficient domain knowledge, then we understand the problem. The second is a failure to recognise that in almost every significant software development effort, there is more than one domain that needs to be understood.
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