3.1 Understanding the Problem and its Domain
The first step in the elicitation process occurs
at the very start of the project during an activity
sometimes referred to as “project blastoff”[12].
During this phase of the project, the problem
domain is explored in order to understand the
context in which the proposed software
application will execute. The task can be
simplified by decomposing the domain into subdomains
[13]. As illustrated in Figure 3, a
preliminary decomposition of an emergency
dispatch center identifies subdomains such as GPS
tracking, emergency services such as police and
fire services, and call dispatch. Robertson refers
to sub-domains as ‘adjacent systems’, because
they are the systems (whether manual or
automated), with which the proposed application
will interact [9,12].