Being able to see that telescopes and glass spheres filled with water are both magnifying devices. Being able to spot similarities between apparently different things. Being able to disregard physical artifacts and see things in the abstract. Domain analysis Domain analysis is the activity of investigating, capturing, and specifying generic knowledge about a subject matter area. The knowledge gained about the domain is used, and hopefully reused, by any project that builds a product to be used within that domain.
Domain analysis works the same way that regular systems analysis does.
That is, you work with domain experts to extract their hitherto unarticulated knowledge, and record it in a manner that lets other analysts reuse it. Once the domain knowledge has been captured and recorded, it becomes available to anyone who builds a product for that domain. The domain knowledge applies to any product for that domain. The point is not to rediscover existing knowledge, but to reuse the models of knowledge. Of course, there is always the problem of deciding precisely what constitutes a domain.