What is Domain Driven Design?

Question

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. H

Answer 1

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.