Role of Domain Ignorance in Software Development: Software Development Tasks Benefiting from Domain Ignorance

Several have reported observations that sometimes ignorance of the domain in a software development project is useful for promoting the elicitation of tacit assumptions and out-of-the-box ideas. This paper reports work putting the observation to an empirical test. A survey was conducted among software development managers of varying experience to determine what software development activities they thought are at least helped by domain ignorance. A companion paper subjects this list to an additional empirical test. Keywords-assigned software engineering tasks, creative ideas, domain awareness, domain ignorance, importance of ignorance, questionnaire, tacit assumptions