Most people get to know Domain-Driven Design through the tactical patterns. Concepts like Value Objects, Entities, Aggregates, Repositories and Event Sourcing are all strongly linked to DDD. That is most likely the reason why many people interpret Domain-Driven Design as a technical thing.

This is quite a misconception though. When talking with the community at DDD Europe, it became more and more clear that this is a widespread delusion. In fact, the technical aspect is only a supporting domain. The core domain of DDD is something completely different.

Domain-Driven Design is an approach that helps you solve the most important problems in businesses through communication and collaboration.

For engineers, it is quite easy to skip through the strategical patterns and the more vague chapters that deal with knowledge gathering and collaborative modelling. This is the heart of DDD though. It wants you to gather all stakeholders for a particular domain around the table and collaboratively come to a shared understanding, helping you solve the problem in the best way possible. This can even mean that the issue gets resolved in a non-technical way (for example by altering a business process instead of building software around it).

DDD is performed on whiteboards, over coffee, and in the corridors with business experts; [1]

Scott Millet

Domain-Driven Design wants to help you avoid the trap of just building the first model that comes to mind. It enables you to find out when certain parts of your domain behave differently in different contexts and how you can keep these cleanly separated (through bounded contexts). It helps you challenge possible solutions with the help of customers, product owners, and other domain experts.

Providing real business value is what the DDD conference is all about, and this is probably why it matches so well with the madewithlove values. It is building what customers need, not what they want, and it is focussing our efforts on what is really at the heart of their business. That’s also why we’re proud to have sponsored the fantastic DDD Europe conference.