Misadventures in DDD With Not-So-Ubiquitous Language

Lots of people have been talking about DDD (Domain-Driven Design) lately, and my friend Tom just discussed it over on his blog in the article Refactoring Toward Deeper Insight. So, I thought I'd share one way not to do DDD.

Once upon a time, shortly after the big blue book was published, I saw it in the store and thought it looked interesting. I bought it and read through the first section about knowledge crunching and ubiquitous language. And it all made so much sense—where I worked, the business analysts and software developers already worked together to crunch knowledge into a domain model they both understood (or so I thought). The trouble was, even though when they talked together, they used that language, when the developers actually wrote the code, they used their own. Why? Well, I didn't know—mostly just because we usually thought our names for things were better, I supposed. Trying to keep the language the same just wasn't something we'd thought about much.

So, I decided that on the project I was working on, we'd start doing DDD by using the names from the business language for the classes in our code. I didn't discuss it with the business people, since I didn't think it involved them much—they didn't need to change their language, we developers just needed to use it.

Everything went fine for most of the project. Then, a couple days before release, the business decided that they wanted to rename one of our core domain concepts—and that was okay, right, because it was just changing a few labels on a few screens?

And that's when I learned that if you want to do DDD, it helps to get buy-in from the business.

So, happy DDD-ing everybody—because I do think lots of the ideas are great and worth exploring—just make sure you let the business know what you're up to and you'll avoid my rookie mistake.