I am having difficulty in attempting to ascertain which domain within a given model can be considered the "core domain". It can be tricky especially if there are several domains which are core to the function of a business.
I would like someone to outline a systematic process to single out the core domain when dealing with a system that has multiple candidates.
Core domain - the most important subdomain, which is essential for the business. Without it the business would fail. If you ever need to pick the first solution to implement - start with the core domain.
Supporting subdomain - subdomain, which is less valuable for business than Core domain. Without it business may be can even survive for some time. But it still is quite important (supports core domain), it also is specific for the domain and has to be developed. In this case, for some reason, we can't buy an existing software or component to solve the problem.
Generic subdomain - subdomain which is less valuable for business than Core domain. It also is generic enough to allow buying it off the shelf (unlike supporting domain).
Do you exactly mean multiple core domain candidates or may be it is multiple bounded contexts in core domain?
"Can Core Domain span multiple Bounded Contexts?" - another SO question
Eric asks several questions to help us identity which parts are core
to the domain:
What makes the system worth writing?
Why not buy it off the shelf?
Why not outsource it?
The core domain is so critical and fundamental to the business that it
gives you a competitive advantage and is a foundational concept behind
the business.
Source
Related
The problem I'm facing is the design of an integration platform.
The company has different tools used for selling online financial services and wants to unify the selling process by creating a common integration platform.
Existing tools range from simply designing a tailor-made offer, to managing all the phases of listing to selling and supporting. The integration platform should orchestrate all the tools.
So I do approach this problem from a DDD point of view?
Domain: selling online services
subdomains: service catalog, request offers, sending offers, buying service, support customer.
bounded context? maybe integration with other company systems like identities and invoices?
My trouble with this is that some existing applications encompass several subdomains, others don't. Also, some applications working in the same subdomain have completely different languages, for example, service vs product, vs project...
How does an integration platform fit in this picture and how would you approach it from a DDD point of view? (or maybe it's a completely wrong approach and should I leave DDD inside each tool and treat them as bounded context?)
I recommend extracting the common bits of meaning (ignoring their names) from the various applications into common domains/bounded contexts. Each bounded context has anti-corruption layers that essentially adapt the language used in one or more existing applications to the one used in the common domain (and vice versa). Then you can cut over the existing applications piece-by-piece to use the respective ACLs to take advantage of the common domain implementation.
Eventually, you might even be able to dispense with the ACLs, as the language becomes more ubiquitous, but it's also perfectly okay to keep them around forever: the ACLs introduce some indirection (and possibly complexity, e.g. if they're deployed as their own microservices) but that's the price you pay for limiting coupling to the ACL.
(It's not clear from the question how experienced you are with DDD).
I was promoted recently as a software architect in a Software development company that produces an Enterprise Content Management product for a customer segment that includes the likes of Insurance companies, Healthcare companies, Research companies and Government agencies.
I had designed moderately complex applications at this organization and my previous jobs.
As a new architect I want to explore Domain Driven Design concepts and various architecture types for migration of our product to a cloud service provider and metamorphize our product from a media based deployment to Software as Service (SAAS) offering.
In my opinion to do this correctly, I will need to create a domain model from the domain for which the software is written.
However the problem I am having is determining what the domain for a product software company is when their products caters to varying needs of disparate customer verticals. I suspect the domain is some kind of meta-domain and not a regular business domain like shipping, insurance or healthcare.
I have following question for this scenario
Question: In terms of Domain Driven Development, what would be the domain of such a company and how can I articulate it so, I can create a domain model?
Identifying the Core Domain can be tricky because the core purpose of your software application can be obfuscated because of all the supporting features that need to be present to make the application useful.
These clues may help you identify and categorize functionality between your Core Domain and Supporting Domains:
Is your software no longer identifiable from a product outside your domain category if you remove a piece of the functionality? You are dealing with a Core Domain.
What is your company's Vision/Mission/Differentiator Statement? They usually reveal the Core Domain.
What category are you and your competitors grouped into in industry reports like Gartner provided? That is your Core Domain.
If your product addresses different customer domains, what common features are used by almost all of them? That is your Core Domain.
Is functionality an industry standard? Does everybody else have it too? Instead of building it, can you buy software off-the-shelf and integrate it into your application, if one were available? If yes, you are dealing with a Supporting Domain.
If you were to remove some functionality because customers do not use it or don't value it enough, would your product still be marketable? That is a Supporting Domain.
Answering these questions will point you in the right direction, but the boundaries of your core domain can be unique to your product's value proposition. Don't hesitate to expand and contract the core domain as the product grows and matures.
Most importantly, talk to your Domain Experts and Salespeople. They usually have a very good idea of what the product pitch is, what is the core value, and what are addons.
Background: an international company with a federation model is transforming into Microservices due to chronic Monolithic pain. Autonomous teams with quick deployment is highly desirable. In spite of theory, services are indeed dependent on each other for higher functionality, but are autonomous (independently developed and deployed). Since this is a federation model and decentralized control, we cannot impose strict rules - just like the UN. Without a governance platform that will manage dependencies else due to the multiple versions in production in different countries, we foresee uncontrollable chaos.
Let's call set of Microservices that needs to collaborate a "Compatibility Set". A service can be deployed but may not satisfy the higher functionality in its Compatibility Set. For example MicroService A-4.3 is fully autonomous, deployed and working perfectly. However to satisfy BusinessFunctionality 8.6 it must work together with MicroService B-5.4 and MicroService C-2.9. Together (A-4.3 , B-5.4 and C-2.9) they form a "Compatibility Set"
There are two approaches to this dilemma. Microservice in real life where the rubber hits the road and the learning from experience begins...
Approach 1) Governance Platform
Rationale: Federal model in an International company in 100+ countries. Which means Central IT can lay down the model but individual countries can choose their own destiny - and they frequently do. It frequently devolves to chaos and the Central IT team is on the hook. DDD is the solution for an ideal world where version inconsistencies do not derail functionality like releasing services which do not fit into the Compatibility set, individually blameless but together they fall apart or result in flawed or inconsistent functionality.
There is no homogeneity, there isn't even standardization of terminology
Developers are mixed skill, many junior, and many learning reactive programming and cloud native technologies
Bounded Context heavily depends on Shared Vocabulary and it can get subtle, but this is impossible to enforce and naive to assume in an International, mixed skill, fragmented scenario with multiple versions running
Standardization on a Single Business Model is not realistic in such a heterogeneous system (but ideal)
How what is Central IT to do when they're held responsible for this Chaos?
Enforce a Governance Platform
Create a Microservices governance system or framework to enforce dependency management. It verifies and enforces at design and run time dependencies on a particular Microservice through a manifest and performs some checks and balances to verify the service implementations being offered - the "Compatibility Set".
Approach 2) Domain Driven Design (DDD)
DDD is about modelling domains that are constantly evolving, where domain experts (typically a business stakeholder, or perhaps an analyst) will work alongside developers to design the system. Within each domain, a ubiquitous language is formed, such that within that context, the same word always means the same thing. An important thing to realise is that in one part of your system, “Order” might mean one thing, it might mean for example a list of products. In another part of your system, “Order” might mean something else, it might mean a financial transaction that happened. This is where the model you describe can fall down, if my service needs to get a list of orders, perhaps there is a capability out there that supplies a list of orders, but which orders are they? The list of products or the financial transaction? Trying to coordinate as many developers as you have to all use the same language here is an impossible task that is doomed to fail.
In DDD, rather than trying to manage this at a system level and force every service to use the same definition of Order, DDD embraces the inherent complexity in coordinating very large deployments with huge numbers of developers involved, and allows each team to work independently, coordinating with other teams as needed, not through some centralised dependency management system. The term used in DDD is bounded contexts, where in one context, Order means one thing, and in another bounded context, Order can mean another thing. These contexts can function truly autonomously – you describe your services as being autonomous, but if they have to match their definition of order with the entire system by registering and supplied dependencies to a central registry, then really they are tightly coupled to the rest of the system and what it considers an order to be – you end up with all the painful coupling of a monolith, with all the pain of building a distributed system, and you won’t realise many of the benefits of microservices if you try to take this approach.
So a DDD based approach doesn’t ever try to take a heavy handed approach of enforcing dependencies or capabilities at the system level, rather, it allows individual teams to work without needing central coordination, if Service A needs to interact with Service B, then the team who manages Service A will work with the team that manages service B, they can build an interface between their bounded contexts, and come to an agreement on language for that interface. It is up to these teams to manage their dependencies with each other, at the system level things can remain quite opaque / unenforced.
Too often we see people implement “Microservices” but end up with a system that is just as, if not more inflexible, and often more fragile, than a monolith. Also called a "Minilith" or "Monolith 2.0" Microservices require a complete rethink of architecture and software development processes, and require not just allowing services to be autonomous and independently managed, but also for teams to be independent, not centrally managed. Centralising the management of dependencies and capabilities in a system is likely to be an inhibitor to successfully building a microservice based system.
Intelligent and Pragmatic comments invited...
Approach 1 (Governance) is pragmatic and tactical and intended to solve very real challenges. Question is - will it undermine the long term strategic DDD model of the Enterprise?
Approach 2 (DDD) is ideal and aspirational but doesn't address the very real challenges that we have to deal with right now.
Opinions? Thought? Comments?
I've seen multi-national companies try to cooperate on a project (or be controlled from a central IT team) and it's a nightmare. This response is highly subjective to what I've personally read and seen, so it's just my opinion, it's probably not everyone's opinion. Generally broad questions aren't encouraged on Stack Overflow as they attract highly opinionated answers.
I'd say DDD probably isn't the answer. You'd need a large number of a developers to buy into the DDD idea. If you don't have that buy-in then (unless you have a team of exceptionally self-motivated people) you'll see the developers try to build the new system on-top of the existing database.
I'd also argue that microservices aren't the answer. Companies that have used microservices to their advantage are essentially using them to compartmentalise their code into small, stacks of individually running services/apps that each do a single job. These microservices (from the success stories I've seen) tend to be loosely coupled. I imagine that if you have a large number of services that are highly coupled, then you've still got the spaghetti aspects of a monolith, but one that's spread out over a network.
It sounds like you just need a well architected system, designed to your specific needs. I agree that using DDD would be great, but is it a realistic goal across a multi-national project?
I also dealt with the problem described in the question. And I came up with an approach in which I use API-definitions like OpenAPI-definitions to check compatibility between two services. The API-definitions must be attached as metadata to each service and therefore it is possible to do the check at run and design time. Important is that the API-definitions are part of the metadata as well when the API is offered and when the API is used. With tools like Swagger-Diff or OpenAPI-Diff it is possible to do the compatibility-check automated.
I am studying Domain Modeling/UML Class diagrams and some of the words aren't being explained in a way I can understand.
I just found out through this wonderful website what "domain" means, is application domain just as simply explained?
There is typically a problem domain and a solution domain. The problem domain describes a situation that needs improvement. For example, it can describe the concepts and processes in a human resources department. The solution domain describe one of possibly many solutions to a problem. One solution might be a streamlined process, another might be an application that takes over parts of a process. An application domain would fall under the solution domain. It would be a description of an application that improves the state of the problem domain.
So, there are three main levels you should distinct:
Project - how you work is organized
Product - the result of your work
Domain : your work helps to some business. That business and its rules and flows is the Domain.
Project is above product, product is above domain.
Some may nit pick over a perception of subtle (or major) differences between the application and solution domain. For the most part and at least in all the software engineering text books I've read the terms are often used interchangeably and will differ in their precise meaning from author to author. This can cause confusion as I've seen application used in two conflicting contexts.
Problem/ Application Domain: The domain in which the software system will be expected to run and survive. As in this is the domain in which the software system will be applied to.
Application/Solution Domain: The software solution/application applied to the problem domain to meet a client's requirements
For these reasons, I dislike the phrase Application Domain because of its potential for ambiguity in how it may be interpreted. I prefer to say 'Problem Domain' (situation in which the software will be used) and 'Solution Domain' (the software and systems built to solve issues in the problem domain).
Can somebody please explain (in succinct terms) what exactly is domain driven design? I see the term quite a lot but really don't understand what it is or what it looks like. How does it differ from non-domain driven design?
Also, can somebody explain what a Domain Object is? How does domain differ from normal objects?
EDIT:
As this seem to be a top result on Google and my answer below is not, please refer to this much better answer:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/1222488/1240557
OLD ANSWER (not so complete :))
In order to create good software, you have to know what that software
is all about. You cannot create a banking software system unless you
have a good understanding of what banking is all about, one must
understand the domain of banking.
From: Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans.
This book does a pretty good job of describing DDD.
Register to download a summary of the book.
Domain Driven Design is a methodology and process prescription for the development of complex systems whose focus is mapping activities, tasks, events, and data within a problem domain into the technology artifacts of a solution domain.
The emphasis of Domain Driven Design is to understand the problem domain in order to create an abstract model of the problem domain which can then be implemented in a particular set of technologies. Domain Driven Design as a methodology provides guidelines for how this model development and technology development can result in a system that meets the needs of the people using it while also being robust in the face of change in the problem domain.
The process side of Domain Driven Design involves the collaboration between domain experts, people who know the problem domain, and the design/architecture experts, people who know the solution domain. The idea is to have a shared model with shared language so that as people from these two different domains with their two different perspectives discuss the solution they are actually discussing a shared knowledge base with shared concepts.
The lack of a shared problem domain understanding between the people who need a particular system and the people who are designing and implementing the system seems to be a core impediment to successful projects. Domain Driven Design is a methodology to address this impediment.
It is more than having an object model. The focus is really about the shared communication and improving collaboration so that the actual needs within the problem domain can be discovered and an appropriate solution created to meet those needs.
Domain-Driven Design: The Good and The Challenging provides a brief overview with this comment:
DDD helps discover the top-level architecture and inform about the
mechanics and dynamics of the domain that the software needs to
replicate. Concretely, it means that a well done DDD analysis
minimizes misunderstandings between domain experts and software
architects, and it reduces the subsequent number of expensive requests
for change. By splitting the domain complexity in smaller contexts,
DDD avoids forcing project architects to design a bloated object
model, which is where a lot of time is lost in working out
implementation details — in part because the number of entities to
deal with often grows beyond the size of conference-room white boards.
Also see this article Domain Driven Design for Services Architecture which provides a short example. The article provides the following thumbnail description of Domain Driven Design.
Domain Driven Design advocates modeling based on the reality of
business as relevant to our use cases. As it is now getting older and
hype level decreasing, many of us forget that the DDD approach really
helps in understanding the problem at hand and design software towards
the common understanding of the solution. When building applications,
DDD talks about problems as domains and subdomains. It describes
independent steps/areas of problems as bounded contexts, emphasizes a
common language to talk about these problems, and adds many technical
concepts, like entities, value objects and aggregate root rules to
support the implementation.
Martin Fowler has written a number of articles in which Domain Driven Design as a methodology is mentioned. For instance this article, BoundedContext, provides an overview of the bounded context concept from Domain Driven Development.
In those younger days we were advised to build a unified model of the
entire business, but DDD recognizes that we've learned that "total
unification of the domain model for a large system will not be
feasible or cost-effective" 1. So instead DDD divides up a large
system into Bounded Contexts, each of which can have a unified model -
essentially a way of structuring MultipleCanonicalModels.
You CAN ONLY understand Domain driven design by first comprehending what the following are:
What is a domain?
The field for which a system is built. Airport management, insurance sales, coffee shops, orbital flight, you name it.
It's not unusual for an application to span several different domains. For example, an online retail system might be working in the domains of shipping (picking appropriate ways to deliver, depending on items and destination), pricing (including promotions and user-specific pricing by, say, location), and recommendations (calculating related products by purchase history).
What is a model?
"A useful approximation to the problem at hand." -- Gerry Sussman
An Employee class is not a real employee. It models a real employee. We know that the model does not capture everything about real employees, and that's not the point of it. It's only meant to capture what we are interested in for the current context.
Different domains may be interested in different ways to model the same thing. For example, the salary department and the human resources department may model employees in different ways.
What is a domain model?
A model for a domain.
What is Domain-Driven Design (DDD)?
It is a development approach that deeply values the domain model and connects it to the implementation. DDD was coined and initially developed by Eric Evans.
Culled from here
Here is another good article that you may check out on Domain Driven Design. if your application is anything serious than college assignment. The basic premise is structure everything around your entities and have a strong domain model. Differentiate between services that provide infrastructure related things (like sending email, persisting data) and services that actually do things that are your core business requirments.
Hope that helps.
As in TDD & BDD you/ team focus the most on test and behavior of the system than code implementation.
Similar way when system analyst, product owner, development team and ofcourse the code - entities/ classes, variables, functions, user interfaces processes communicate using the same language, its called Domain Driven Design
DDD is a thought process. When modeling a design of software you need to keep business domain/process in the center of attention rather than data structures, data flows, technology, internal and external dependencies.
There are many approaches to model systerm using DDD
event sourcing (using events as a single source of truth)
relational databases
graph databases
using functional languages
Domain object:
In very naive words, an object which
has name based on business process/flow
has complete control on its internal state i.e exposes methods to manipulate state.
always fulfill all business invariants/business rules in context of its use.
follows single responsibility principle
DDD(domain driven design) is a useful concept for analyse of requirements of a project and handling the complexity of these requirements.Before that people were analysing these requirements with considering the relationships between classes and tables and in fact their design were based on database tables relationships it is not old but it has some problems:
In big projects with complex requirements it is not useful although this is a great way of design for small projects.
when you are dealing with none technical persons that they don,t have technical concept, this conflict may cause some huge problems in our project.
So DDD handle the first problem with considering the main project as a Domain and splitting each part of this project to small pieces which we are famous to Bounded Context and each of them do not have any influence on other pieces.
And the second problem has been solved with a ubiquitous language which is a common language between technical team members and Product owners which are not technical but have enough knowledge about their requirements
Generally the simple definition for Domain is the main project that makes money for the owners and other teams.
I do not want to repeat others' answers, so, in short I explain some common misunderstanding
Practical resource: PATTERNS, PRINCIPLES, AND PRACTICES OF DOMAIN-DRIVEN DESIGN by Scott Millett
It is a methodology for complicated business systems. It takes all the technical matters out when communicating with business experts
It provides an extensive understanding of (simplified and distilled model of) business across the whole dev team.
it keeps business model in sync with code model by using ubiquitous language (the language understood by the whole dev team, business experts, business analysts, ...), which is used for communication within the dev team or dev with other teams
It has nothing to do with Project Management. Although it can be perfectly used in project management methods like Agile.
You should avoid using it all across your project
DDD stresses the need to focus the most effort on the core subdomain. The core subdomain is the
area of your product that will be the difference between it being a success and it being a failure. It’s
the product’s unique selling point, the reason it is being built rather than bought.
Basically, it is because it takes too much time and effort. So, it is suggested to break down the whole domain into subdomain and just apply it in those with high business value. (ex not in generic subdomain like email, ...)
It is not object oriented programming. It is mostly problem solving approach and (sometimes) you do not need to use OO patterns (such as Gang of Four) in your domain models. Simply because it can not be understood by Business Experts (they do not know much about Factory, Decorator, ...). There are even some patterns in DDD (such as The Transaction Script, Table Module) which are not 100% in line with OO concepts.
I believe the following pdf will give you the bigger picture. Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans
NOTE: Think of a project you can work on, apply the little things you understood and see best practices. It will help you to grow your ability to the micro service architecture design approach too.
Get an organization wide understanding of the problem domain by
developing a ubiquitous language (a common mental model) per sub-problem-domain.
Use that language as close as possible in solution domains (code).
Only then choose technologies.
Don't be technology driven but problem domain or business driven.