"Domain Driven Design – the Movie" in NYC

The video shows short snippets of a couple of developers and a domain expert working together to improve the domain model for an application along with commentary by Eric and Vlad. It worked through the process of discussing, refining and testing a design in code to better align the object model of a financial application with domain concepts that made sense to the domain expert.

Short vignettes of the story were interspersed with analysis by Eric and Vlad focusing on the process of eliciting a Ubiquitous Language. The commentary touched on the domain model but was much more focused on the soft skills that always make the difference between an excellent and an average analyst. While they didn't explicitly go into subtleties of matching and mirroring,modalities, language patterns, deep listening and some of the other techniques available for building rapport and eliciting quality feedback (hey, you can only do so much in 40 minutes) it was great to see an explicit focus on the soft skills that often have a huge impact on the success of a project.

I think that DDD provides a great framework for doing a better job of developing elegant, broadly comprehensible object models and languages that can be understood by all of a projects stakeholders. It's also the obvious complement to Domain Specific Languages and Domain Specific Modeling (although Eric notes that Ubiquitous Languages do not need to be unambiguous or potentially executable).

There are a lot of subtleties that aren't explicitly discussed widely within the developer community from Chomsky to Bandler & Grinder and it'll be interesting to see if DDD becomes a rallying point for a greater focus on the importance of language and soft skills within the developer community.

Do you have any experience with Domain Driven Design in your applications?

© Vlad Gitlevich 2008