Domain-Driven Analysis: Quickly Getting to Grips with a New Domain

When joining a new company or working with a new client, you need to build up an understanding of how the business works and the complexities of the existing system in order to answer questions such as:

  • How can you enrich your customer experience?
  • How can you better align your system with the needs of the business?

You'll be talking to lots of people, reading lots of documentation, and your challenge is how to start making sense of it all and start contributing. You will benefit greatly from having a diverse toolbox of analysis techniques to:

  • build a shared understanding of the current system with colleagues and domain experts.
  • find gaps and fix problems with the customer experience evolve the system to meet the changing needs of customers and business stakeholders.

If you're new to Domain-Driven Design or you have a limited analysis toolbox, this workshop will teach you a few remote-friendly techniques and principles that you will be able to apply immediately to start learning domains faster.

Domain-Driven Analysis is a loosely-structured way of understanding the current system so you can start reasoning about how the system can be evolved to better satisfy your customers' needs.

What you'll learn:

Event Storming is sometimes assumed to be the only DDD way to do analysis, but in this workshop you'll learn four other visual collaboration and modeling techniques, each bringing different insights:

You'll also learn heuristics on what techniques to use when. Then, if you run into issues, you'll learn how to adapt by mixing and matching these techniques to solve problems.

You'll work as a group to use these different techniques in a real problem space and exercise your visual collaborative brain muscles to reason about the problem.

Once you learn these ways, you could potentially combine all of these methods and come up with your own unique way of doing Domain-Driven Analysis, even in a fully remote environment in this Covid era.

Who should attend:

  • Product and engineering people who need to learn a new domain quickly
  • Developer / team lead / architect wondering how to introduce visual modeling techniques and DDD to your team
  • Anyone involved in build vs buy vs outsource decisions
  • Consultants who regularly work with new clients and need to learn their domains quickly

If you're an expert facilitator of visual collaboration techniques like Eventstorming and are comfortable introducing it to your teams, this workshop is probably NOT for you.


Speaker

Indu Alagarsamy

Principal Engineer @CircleCI, 25 Years of Software Development Experience

Over the past 25 years, Indu has worked across various industries, including publishing and media, healthcare, finance, biotech, and emergency services. She helped lead and successfully deliver a complex legacy modernization initiative for the NYTimes. She is currently working as a Principal Engineer at CircleCI to help improve the overall developer experience by enhancing CI/CD capabilities and enabling faster, more reliable software delivery.

She loves making sense of complex systems. She leans heavily on Domain-Driven Design and Systems Thinking to unpack complexity in a structured manner—but also borrows freely from Design and other disciplines, to shape unique approaches for understanding and solving problems. It's a bit of a remix, but it works. She writes about what she learns (and sometimes what she unlearns) at domainanalysis.io.

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Date

Thursday Oct 5 / 09:00AM PDT ( 7 hours )

Location

Marina

Level

Level beginner to intermediate

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Prerequisites

  • Your Laptop. 
  • We will be using Figjam. Figjam is a whiteboard tool similar to Miro for collaboration. A Figjam account is NOT needed. The advantage of using Figjam is that when you complete this workshop and return to the real world of working remotely, you can continue using the templates and the format instead of the post-it notes that may be lost forever in the workshop. We will also be collaborating using sticky notes and flip charts. 
  • Previous knowledge of DDD is NOT required
  • Experience using visual collaboration techniques is NOT required