Paul Rayner: Accelerating Product Delivery with DDD

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Comment by Frank Vega on August 28, 2012 at 10:37am

Hi All,

Pic from Paul's presentation on DDD. See comment below too for a brief summary!

Take care,

Frank

www.vissinc.com

Comment by Frank Vega on August 28, 2012 at 10:34am

Hi,

 

Thanks to all who attended Agile Denver’s presentation last night. A big THANK YOU to Joe Wilson from Volare Systems for sponsoring the event venue and food (greatly appreciated having something else than our usual pizza :>) and sharing some about his company and the software development services they provide using agile practices. A big THANK YOU to Paul Rayner with Domain Language. I’ll post a comment here pointing to slides when I get a PDF from Paul. For those who didn’t attend, in short, whether you coach others in lean-agile processes, mentor others in XP practices, manage a development team, and especially if you’re a software architect, developer, or tester, I recommend you catch up with Paul and learn more about Domain-Driven Design. Below is my brief summary of the presentation.

 

Paul started off reminding us, while there is great value focusing on “how” we develop software (ex. XP practices, Scrum, etc.), we must also deal with “what” we develop through designing and building software that is “useful”, not just on-time or technically sound for the moment. These latter two objectives are important, but also is the “usefulness” (effectiveness in solving a business problem or providing a service) as well as ease in understanding, maintaining, and changing and updating our application in the long term. Skillfully applying XP technical practices and the lean-agile processes definitely contributes to building quality software. However, in many organizations, especially in parts of the business domains where complex business rules exist, other “tools” are needed. How many applications have you worked on that over time become less useful or harder and harder to understand and maintain? Do you work in a business domain where complex business rules make it challenging to “model” your application in a way that business domain experts and developers communicate easily about what the application should do?

 

Paul described that while Domain-Driven Design does in fact have a technical aspect, it is important to recognize too it is much more. He gave a real world non-IT/IS example of the value of models, why they are developed, and used. From there he walked us through a tangible real-world business IT/IS “modeling” example, guiding us through a possible series of analysis and design steps while also challenging our decisions at times along the way to help us recognize other options for “future consideration.” The exercise was extremely effective as I noticed the entire group was following along with no body lost as we went through this with Paul. In closing, I was glad to see we had a number of first time attendees but I was even happier to see that for more than half attending, it was their first presentation specifically to learn more about DDD. Yes, even if you don’t consider yourself a “technical type”, I feel you’ll be surprised and benefit greatly from learning more about DDD and highly recommend you leverage Paul’s expertise, effective presentation style, and LOCAL availability :>).

 

Again, please also share with Brad (Swanson), Som (Ghosh), Tom (Smallwood), Walt (DenHaan), or me (Frank Vega), topics that you'd be interested in seeing (and volunteering to present on :>). We want to hear from many more out there, from your latest real world on the floor experiences. Team presentations work too. Agile Denver’s monthly meetings are a great opportunity for you to improve and tune a presentation prior to presenting at a larger conference. If you’re interested in “testing” out a Lightning Talk please also let us know. If we get enough, we might try another night of Lightning Talks. However, we’re also open to adding one to a presentation as well and see how that works.

 

Take care,

Frank

www.vissinc.com