What is Domain Driven Design?
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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. How does it differ from non-domain driven design?

Also, can somebody explain what a Domain Object is? How does domain differ from normal objects?

Persis answered 16/3, 2011 at 13:15 Comment(4)
possible duplicate of What is domain driven design?Ashtoreth
stackoverflow.com/tags/domain-driven-design/infoKathleenkathlene
Does this answer your question? What is Domain Driven Design (DDD)?Mo
feel free to check this: youtu.be/MfEpw2WXXykEastsoutheast
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EDIT:

As this seem to be a top result on Google and my answer below is not, please refer to this much better answer:

https://mcmap.net/q/99218/-what-is-domain-driven-design-ddd-closed

OLD ANSWER (not so complete :))

In order to create good software, you have to know what that software is all about. You cannot create a banking software system unless you have a good understanding of what banking is all about, one must understand the domain of banking.

From: Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans.

This book does a pretty good job of describing DDD.

Register to download a summary of the book.

Stagemanage answered 16/3, 2011 at 13:24 Comment(8)
That mini version is an excellent reference and I find it helpful even with a copy of the full text on hand. I generally go to it first and then the text for more detail.Silma
So I take from this "read this book" answer that it is impossible to summarise DDD in simply a few paragraphs? How can a design philosophy be so complicated?Swann
I wouldn't say it is impossible, but I thought there are better places to read about it and Eric Evans book is the best source for it imo, so why duplicate that here?Seringa
But what you've created is a link only answer: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8231/…Swann
And you improved it. Cheers!Seringa
Dear reader: if you, like me, arrived here from the top Google result and were disappointed to find the accepted answer so underwhelming (apologies, Mikael) fear not, there are more satisfying explanations here on SO: https://mcmap.net/q/99218/-what-is-domain-driven-design-ddd-closedSampson
There, I've updated my answer with the link. That was a much better answer. Thanks!Seringa
The Download summary directly link is deadSludge
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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.

Burstone answered 14/2, 2016 at 16:44 Comment(0)
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You CAN ONLY understand Domain driven design by first comprehending what the following are:

What is a domain?

The field for which a system is built. Airport management, insurance sales, coffee shops, orbital flight, you name it.

It's not unusual for an application to span several different domains. For example, an online retail system might be working in the domains of shipping (picking appropriate ways to deliver, depending on items and destination), pricing (including promotions and user-specific pricing by, say, location), and recommendations (calculating related products by purchase history).

What is a model?

"A useful approximation to the problem at hand." -- Gerry Sussman

An Employee class is not a real employee. It models a real employee. We know that the model does not capture everything about real employees, and that's not the point of it. It's only meant to capture what we are interested in for the current context.

Different domains may be interested in different ways to model the same thing. For example, the salary department and the human resources department may model employees in different ways.

What is a domain model?

A model for a domain.

What is Domain-Driven Design (DDD)?

It is a development approach that deeply values the domain model and connects it to the implementation. DDD was coined and initially developed by Eric Evans.

Culled from here

Eh answered 13/9, 2017 at 7:21 Comment(0)
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Here is another good article that you may check out on Domain Driven Design. if your application is anything serious than college assignment. The basic premise is structure everything around your entities and have a strong domain model. Differentiate between services that provide infrastructure related things (like sending email, persisting data) and services that actually do things that are your core business requirments.

Hope that helps.

Apthorp answered 17/3, 2011 at 13:31 Comment(0)
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As in TDD & BDD you/ team focus the most on test and behavior of the system than code implementation.

Similar way when system analyst, product owner, development team and ofcourse the code - entities/ classes, variables, functions, user interfaces processes communicate using the same language, its called Domain Driven Design

DDD is a thought process. When modeling a design of software you need to keep business domain/process in the center of attention rather than data structures, data flows, technology, internal and external dependencies.

There are many approaches to model systerm using DDD

  • event sourcing (using events as a single source of truth)
  • relational databases
  • graph databases
  • using functional languages

Domain object:

In very naive words, an object which

  • has name based on business process/flow
  • has complete control on its internal state i.e exposes methods to manipulate state.
  • always fulfill all business invariants/business rules in context of its use.
  • follows single responsibility principle
Mumbletypeg answered 1/11, 2018 at 6:44 Comment(4)
TDD - Test Driven DevelopmentMumbletypeg
BDD - Behavior Driven DevelopmentMumbletypeg
DDD - Domain Driven DevelopmentMumbletypeg
DDD -> Domain Driven Design ~Development~Tain
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DDD(domain driven design) is a useful concept for analyse of requirements of a project and handling the complexity of these requirements.Before that people were analysing these requirements with considering the relationships between classes and tables and in fact their design were based on database tables relationships it is not old but it has some problems:

  • In big projects with complex requirements it is not useful although this is a great way of design for small projects.

  • when you are dealing with none technical persons that they don,t have technical concept, this conflict may cause some huge problems in our project.

So DDD handle the first problem with considering the main project as a Domain and splitting each part of this project to small pieces which we are famous to Bounded Context and each of them do not have any influence on other pieces. And the second problem has been solved with a ubiquitous language which is a common language between technical team members and Product owners which are not technical but have enough knowledge about their requirements

Generally the simple definition for Domain is the main project that makes money for the owners and other teams.

Scranton answered 11/8, 2019 at 11:17 Comment(0)
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I do not want to repeat others' answers, so, in short I explain some common misunderstanding

  • Practical resource: PATTERNS, PRINCIPLES, AND PRACTICES OF DOMAIN-DRIVEN DESIGN by Scott Millett
  • It is a methodology for complicated business systems. It takes all the technical matters out when communicating with business experts
  • It provides an extensive understanding of (simplified and distilled model of) business across the whole dev team.
  • it keeps business model in sync with code model by using ubiquitous language (the language understood by the whole dev team, business experts, business analysts, ...), which is used for communication within the dev team or dev with other teams
  • It has nothing to do with Project Management. Although it can be perfectly used in project management methods like Agile.
  • You should avoid using it all across your project

    DDD stresses the need to focus the most effort on the core subdomain. The core subdomain is the area of your product that will be the difference between it being a success and it being a failure. It’s the product’s unique selling point, the reason it is being built rather than bought.

    Basically, it is because it takes too much time and effort. So, it is suggested to break down the whole domain into subdomain and just apply it in those with high business value. (ex not in generic subdomain like email, ...)

  • It is not object oriented programming. It is mostly problem solving approach and (sometimes) you do not need to use OO patterns (such as Gang of Four) in your domain models. Simply because it can not be understood by Business Experts (they do not know much about Factory, Decorator, ...). There are even some patterns in DDD (such as The Transaction Script, Table Module) which are not 100% in line with OO concepts.

Cartel answered 18/5, 2020 at 12:37 Comment(0)
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I believe the following pdf will give you the bigger picture. Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans

NOTE: Think of a project you can work on, apply the little things you understood and see best practices. It will help you to grow your ability to the micro service architecture design approach too.

Protoxylem answered 9/5, 2019 at 13:35 Comment(0)
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Get an organization wide understanding of the problem domain by developing a ubiquitous language (a common mental model) per sub-problem-domain. Use that language as close as possible in solution domains (code). Only then choose technologies. Don't be technology driven but problem domain or business driven.

Barchan answered 21/1, 2022 at 13:14 Comment(0)

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