From EberhardtRechtin's SystemsArchitecting: : [The heuristic approach]'s central ideas ... come from asking architects what they do when confronted with highly complex problems. The skilled architect and designer most likely would answer, "'Just use common sense'." ... a better expression than "common sense" is 'contextual' sense - a knowledge of what is reasonable within a given context. Practicing architects through education, experience, and examples accumulate a considerable body of contextual sense by the time they are entrusted with solving a system-level problem--typically 10 years. A problem in the software development industry, which is young, is that architects and developers are often responsible for solving problems requiring more contextual sense than they've accumulated.