Data Contracts

Chapter 11. Creating Your First Wins with Data Contracts

We want to make it clear that this chapter is intended for the specific audience of leaders implementing data contracts within enterprises. While you may find value in this chapter even if you are not an enterprise leader, note that this chapter dives deep into the management side of implementing data contracts with this assumption. Our reasons for the special attention to this facet of data contract implementation are the following.

The past few years devoted to writing this book and implementing data contracts across different organizations have made it abundantly clear that the technology of data contracts is relatively straightforward, but the adoption of this technology is quite complex. If you recall in Chapter 3, we highlighted Conway’s Law (i.e., how team structure and communication shape systems) and Dunbar’s Number (i.e., the breakdown of communication among more than 150 employees) as driving forces that make data contracts necessary for change management in data-enabled software systems.

While organizations of any size can implement data contracts, we have found that enterprise-scale organizations are the ones most likely to earnestly pursue them. Enterprises have a large number of software and data developers distributed across multiple teams and locations (sometimes even countries). Furthermore, beyond the scale of the systems, the diversity in tooling and maintenance of legacy systems within enterprises is ...