1. Domain-Driven Design

Domain-Driven Design, or DDD, is an approach for building high-quality software that meets core business objectives. It emphasizes collaboration among domain experts, developers, UX designers and other disciplines to create a domain model that reflects the needs of the business. This involves agreeing on common terminology (a.k.a. the Ubiquitous Language), identifying business entities, their behavior and relationships and organizing them in a way that lends itself to a clean and modular implementation.

This article explains DDD concepts using the example of a trading application called Bullsfirst. It is a sample application that demonstrates the use of best practices in software development. The diagram below shows the architecture of Bullsfirst.

Bullsfirst Platform

At a very high level, users can enter orders to buy and sell securities through the front-end. The orders are managed by an Order Management System (OMS), which is typically owned by a brokerage firm. The OMS places the orders in an Exchange where a matching engine matches them and executes trades.

This article has been structured to introduce the fundamental DDD concepts upfront. If you are a domain expert, developer, UX designer, tester or anyone generally interested in learning about DDD, go through sections 2 (Ubiquitous Language) and 3 (Domain Model). For a deeper understanding, especially for developers, go through all the remaining sections.

Navigation

  1. Introduction
  2. Ubiquitous Language

  3. Domain Model

  4. Bounded Context

  5. Command-Query Separation

  6. Layered Architecture

  7. Domain Layer

  8. Conclusion