Once a year, we run a short survey. Not to tick a box, but because the DDD community moves fast and the people who show up for our workshops tend to have very clear opinions about what should come next.
A note on methodology: this survey reached people already engaged with the DDD Academy community: through our newsletter, DDD Europe, and social channels. The results reflect the views of practitioners who were already interested enough to respond, not the broader software development population. Keep that in mind when reading the intent and enthusiasm figures; they skew high by design.
55 practitioners completed our survey. Here is what we found.
The audience is experienced
Nearly half of the respondents described themselves as advanced, and another 11% as experts. Only one respondent described themselves as a complete beginner.
From this Survey we could conclude that the demand for depth is growing. However, this is not something we can deduct from our workshop participation.
Most respondents haven't attended yet, but nearly all want to
62% have not taken a DDD Academy workshop before. Of those who haven't, 60% said they would "probably" or "definitely" attend one soon. The reasons for not having done so yet are mostly pragmatic: format, timing, and finding the right topic. Price was cited by 2 respondents.
These practitioners value quality training and are willing to invest in it.
The most wanted new workshop is Strategic Design and Bounded Context evolution
32 out of 55 respondents chose it. That is 58% of everyone who filled in the survey. Second place went to DDD in distributed systems (20 votes), followed by advanced case-study modelling (17), advanced Event Sourcing and CQRS (16), and legacy migration strategies (15).
The shape of this data is important. The community is asking for the harder problems: long-lived systems with shifting boundaries, distributed architectures, and the political and organisational work of embedding DDD across teams.
Stakeholder buy-in and transformation leadership are as interesting as the technical patterns
Among existing workshop topics, "Convincing stakeholders" received the most interest (23 votes), narrowly ahead of "Leading transformations" (22). Bounded contexts and legacy integration tied at 19. This mirrors something we hear regularly in our workshops: the hardest part of DDD is rarely the modelling. It is making the case internally and sustaining the practice over time.
Formats: multi-day immersive and multiple half-days
If you are choosing between a single long day and spreading the same content across several shorter sessions, the community leans towards spreading it out. 33 respondents chose multi-day immersive (2 to 3 days), 28 chose multiple half-days, and 25 chose a 1-day intensive.
Notably, 18 want in-person only. The appetite for high-quality in-person learning has not gone away.
What the community said in their own words:
One attendee wrote: "Keep doing what you do. It's a gem to be able to systematically find high-quality workshops that, even though they are expensive, have proven to be totally worth their price."
Another described the long-term impact of attending three workshops: "My client offered me a promotion to Tech Lead. I would say this was mainly due to the accelerated improvement the workshops caused."
A third described how EventStorming changed their client work: "I invite developers and clients and together we map out the processes that will be digitised on the wall. The developers praise the better understanding of the overall scope."
While we continue to make plans, the workshop catalog is the place to explore what is already on the schedule. And if you have feedback for us, we are here to listen.
Ready to level up? Browse all workshops at ddd.academy