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

Two day workshop
Indu Alagarsamy and Nick Tune

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

No dates are scheduled for this workshop. Let us know if you think we should organize it near you, or if you'd like to book it on premise in your organisation.


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 4 new 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 modelling techniques, each bringing different insights:

  • Service Blueprints. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/service-blueprints-definition/
  • Value Stream Mapping https://www.atlassian.com/continuous-delivery/principles/value-stream-mapping
  • Wardley Mapping - https://learnwardleymapping.com
  • Capability Mapping

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 modelling 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.

Pre-requisite:

  • Your Laptop and a free Miro account (miro.com). While doing these exercises collaboratively, we will still use Miro. The advantage of using Miro 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.
  • Previous knowledge of DDD is NOT required
  • Experience using visual collaboration techniques is NOT required
Indu Alagarsamy

About Indu Alagarsamy

Indu enjoys designing distributed systems using event-driven architecture style and domain-driven design principles. She has over 15 years of software development experience working with various industries like healthcare, finance, biotech, and emergency services.

She is currently a Principal Engineer at the New York Times. She is passionate about diversity and inclusiveness in the tech industry. When not working, she's an occasional rock climber, who loves to chill in sunny Southern California with her kids and giant puppy.

All workshops by Indu Alagarsamy
@Indu_alagarsamy
Nick Tune

About Nick Tune

Nick works with technology leaders to map strategy, architect systems, and build continuous delivery teams. He is the co-author of Principles and Practices of Domain-Driven Design (2014), and Architecture Modernization: Product, Domain, and Team-oriend (2022).

All workshops by Nick Tune
@ntcoding

No dates are scheduled for this workshop. Let us know if you think we should organize it near you, or if you'd like to book it on premise in your organisation.


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