Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software

The decision process must absorb feedback
Creating an organizing principle, large-scale structure, or distillation of such subtlety requires a
really deep understanding of the needs of the project and the concepts of the domain. The only
people who have that depth of knowledge are the members of the application development team.
This explains why application architectures created by architecture teams are so seldom helpful,
despite the undeniable talent of many of the architects.
Unlike technical infrastructure and architectures, strategic design does not itself involve writing a
lot of code, although it influences all development. What it does require is involvement with the
application development teams. An experienced architect may be able to listen to ideas coming
from various teams and facilitate the development of a generalized solution.
One technical architecture team I worked with actually circulated its own members through the
various application development teams that were attempting to use its framework. This rotation
pulled into the architecture team the hands-on experience of the challenges facing the developers,
while it simultaneously transferred the knowledge of how to apply the subtleties of the framework.
Strategic design has this same need of a tight feedback loop.
The plan must allow for evolution
Effective software development is a highly dynamic process. When the highest level of decisions is
set in stone, the team has fewer options when it must respond to change. E
VOLVING ORDER
avoids
this trap by emphasizing ongoing change to the large-scale structure in response to deepening
insight.
When too many design decisions are preordained, the development team can be hobbled, without
the flexibility to solve the problems they are charged with. So, while a harmonizing principle can
be valuable, it must grow and change with the ongoing life of the development project, and it must
not take too much power away from the application developers, whose job is hard enough as it is.

---

With strong feedback, innovations emerge as obstacles are encountered in building applications
and as unexpected opportunities are discovered.