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QCon 2008 features domain-driven development


By Alex Handy
November 20, 2008 — 
The many branches on the agile tree have given way to entirely new forests of guerilla development tactics. So say the attendees of the QCon development conference in San Francisco this week. The conference is focused on the many forms of agile, strategies for clouds, and the hulking presence of multithreading and parallelism.

With an entire track dedicated to domain-driven design and development, QCon promises a fresh perspective on the world of requirements gathering and business process modeling. Eric Evans, author of Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software, is hosting this track, which is largely inspired by his book. But even outside of that track, the concepts of ubiquitous languages permeated the conference.

While Evans' track takes place tomorrow, Dan North, a consultant with enterprise software development consulting firm ThoughtWorks, discussed the domain-driven model in his talk yesterday. North spoke about what he called behavior-driven development.

At the core of both practices is a mandate for the creation of a language common to the business problem being solved. North said that business analysts and software developers think in different languages. But most of the terms needed to discuss a business problem cogently can be applied to both the digital and analog worlds.

“Let's just try all using the same words to mean then same thing,” said North. “I was consulting in a place where they handled things called credit derivatives, where you have this concept of pricing. It requires big grids. There [was] a pair of developers struggling with this pricing algorithm. A business analyst passed, and they had a conversation. I watched this. It was beautiful because at no point did he realize that they were talking about code. He was talking about pricing. They were having this fluid conversation. This guy didn't realize he was talking about objects.

“It's not just a thought exercise. Let's start having a shared language. A ubiquitous language is when you drive that into your software artifacts. Classes are named what they're named in the domain. What you'll find [is that] when you model stuff, you'll get work done.”

The simple act of naming a class after the very business table it is modeled upon can save time and effort later on, said North. This extends down to the variables, he said, insisting that developers name their data in a fashion consistent to the real world. He said that building a language that people use to describe the project can bring teams closer together, and it allows for breakthroughs to occur over cubicle walls rather than in meeting rooms.

Elsewhere at QCon, many talks focused on the cutting edge of Web and cloud development. Topics included Erlang as a path to massive parallelism and Merb as an alternative to Ruby on Rails. Microsoft's forthcoming F# programming language was also previewed, and developers got a crash course in the Eclipse Mylyn project this morning.

Tomorrow, alongside Evans' domain-driven track, is a track titled “Architectures You've Always Wondered About.” That track will feature speakers from behind the scenes at Digg, eBay and Facebook to discuss the development challenges they faced.


Related Search Term(s): agile development, cloud computing, requirements


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