Knowledge-intensive software design systems: Can too much knowledge be a burden?

While acknowledging the considerable benefits of domain-specific, knowledge-intensive approaches to automated software engineering, it is prudent to carefully examine the costs of such approaches, as well. In adding domain knowledge to a system, a developer makes a commitment to understanding, representing, maintaining, and communicating that knowledge. This substantial overhead is not generally associated with domain-independent approaches. In this paper, I examine the downside of incorporating additional knowledge, and illustrate with examples based on our experiences building the SIGMA system. I also offer some guidelines for developers building domain-specific systems.