Domain-Driven Transformation

Chapter 10. Step 1—Domain Rediscovery

In this chapter we will cover the first step of strategic Domain-Driven Transformation: domain rediscovery. To rediscover the domain, we need to recapture and understand the business processes in the domain. The goal is to uncover how the business really works together with domain experts, developers, and domain modelers—for the time being independently of existing software.

We have shown the coarse process of strategic transformation in Figure III-1. In Figure 10-1 we go one level deeper and see the substeps that make up step 1.

Domain modelers, domain experts, and the development team come together in a workshop and use methods from Collaborative Modeling (see Chapter 4) to rediscover the business domain. The goal of this workshop is to clarify:

• How the subject matter experts work (business processes)

• What they work with (work items/work objects and domain concepts)

• What it is exactly (domain language) that they work with

• Why the domain experts do or need these things

Here it makes sense not to dive into every detail, but to stay on a coarse- to medium-grained level, otherwise the discussion will get out of hand. So you will hear the domain modeler say time and again: “This is getting into too much detail now; let’s get an overview first!”

Figure 10-1. Strategic transformation—step 1 in its substeps.

In Figure 10-1 you can see ...