Domain-driven design, or DDD for short, is a term introduced by Eric Evans in his book of the same title. In essence, it's about improving communication between business and engineering and bringing the developers' attention to the domain model. Basing the implementation of this model often leads to designs that are easier to understand and evolve together with the model changes.
What has DDD got to do with Agile? Let's recall a part of the Agile Manifesto:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
— The Agile Manifesto
In order to make the proper design decisions, you must understand the domain first. To do so, you'll need to talk to people a lot and encourage your developer teams to narrow the gap between them and business people. The concepts in the code should be named after entities that are part of ubiquitous language. It's basically the common part of business experts' jargon and technical experts' jargon. Countless misunderstandings can be caused by each of these groups using terms that the other understands differently, leading to flaws in business logic implementations and often subtle bugs. Naming things with care and using terms agreed by both groups can mean bliss for the project. Having a business analyst or other business domain experts as part of the team can help a lot here.
If you're modeling a bigger system, it might be hard to make all the terms mean the same to different teams. This is because each of those teams really operates in a different context. DDD proposes the use of bounded contexts to deal with this. If you're modeling, say, an e-commerce system, you might want to think of the terms just in terms of a shopping context, but upon a closer look, you may discover that the inventory, delivery, and accounting teams actually all have their own models and terms.
Each of those is a different subdomain of your e-commerce domain. Ideally, each can be mapped to its own bounded context – a part of your system with its own vocabulary. It's important to set clear boundaries of such contexts when splitting your solution into smaller modules. Just like its context, each module has clear responsibilities, its own database schema, and its own code base. To help communicate between the teams in larger systems, you might want to introduce a context map, which will show how the terms from different contexts relate to each other:
As you now understand some of the important project-management topics, we can switch to a few more technical ones.
