As suggested by its name, Domain-Driven Design is not only about Event Sourcing and CQRS. It all starts with the domain and a lot of key insights that are too easy to overlook at first. Even if you’ve read the “blue book” already, I suggest you read it again as the book is at the same time wide and deep.

You got talent

Behind the basics of Domain-Driven Design, one important idea is to harness the huge talent we all have: the ability to speak, and this talent of natural language can help us reason about the considered domain.

Just like multi-touch and tangible interfaces aim at reusing our natural strength in using our fingers, Eric Evans suggests that we use our language ability as an actual tool to try out loud modelling concepts, and to test if they pass the simple test of being useful in sentences about the domain.

This is a simple idea, yet powerful. No need for any extra framework or tool, one of the most powerful tool we can imagine is already there, wired in our brain. The trick is to find a middle way between natural language in all its fuzziness, and an expressive model that we can discuss without ambiguity, and this is exactly what the Ubiquitous Language addresses.

One model to rule them all

Another key insight in Domain-Driven Design is to identify -equate- the implementation model with the analysis model, so that there is only one model across every aspect of the software process, from requirements and analysis to code.

This does not mean you must have only one domain model in your application, in fact you will probably get more than one model across the various areas* of the application. But this means that in each area there must be only one model shared by developers and domain experts. This clearly opposes to some early methodologies that advocated a distinct analysis modelling then a separate, more detailed implementation modelling. This also leads naturally to the Ubiquitous Language, a common language between domain experts and the technical team.

The key driver is that the knowledge gained through analysis can be directly used in the implementation, with no gap, mismatch or translation. This assumes of course that the underlying programming language is modelling-oriented, which object oriented languages obviously are.

What form for the model?

Shall the model be expressed in UML? Eric Evans is again quite pragmatic: nothing beats natural language to express the two essential aspects of a model: the meaning of its concepts, and their behaviour. Text, in English or any other spoken language, is therefore the best choice to express a model, while diagrams, standard or not, even pictures, can supplement to express a particular structure or perspective.

If you try to express the entirety of the model using UML, then you’re just using UML as a programming language. Using only a programming language such as Java to represent a model exhibits by the way the same shortcoming: it is hard to get the big picture and to grasp the large scale structure. Simple text documents along with some diagrams and pictures, if really used and therefore kept up-to-date, help explain what’s important about the model, otherwise expressed in code.

A final remark

The beauty in Domain-Driven Design is that it is not just a set of independent good ideas on why and how to build domain models; it is itself a complete system of inter-related ideas, each useful on their own but that also supplement each other. For example, the idea of using natural language as a modelling tool and the idea of sharing one same model for analysis and implementation both lead to the Ubiquitous Language.

* Areas would typically be different Bounded Contexts