Marcio Marinho

The ubiquitous language is one of the crucial parts of Domain Driven Design, because it’s the basis of all communication among all the team. It’s hard to point out how it’s important to a project, because maybe everyone inside a project have a particular “view” about the same project, I mean a business analyst would be closer to the user who is giving the requirements, and afterwords these same requirements will be translated to a bunch of documents and diagrams that will ultimately reach the developers, who will deliver the most waited product, the production code!

As I stated before, the communication is the heart of everything in software development, so, how can we achieve of deliver the software that the customer wants if we can’t completely understand the user language, jargons and way of work ? we simply CAN’T.

I remember a project where I worked, first providing bug fixes, and later working to re-write it, where we had a glossary about all the terms the software had, of course, they were all related to the users terms. This application was a governamental app, that handled some kind of documents and users workflow. So, the users usually talk to us using their language, about how the documents should be “routed” between two departments, how it should be handled, who was responsible for “stamp”, “endorse”, “forward” or “deny” something related to the documents they were receiving. The glossary was a nice tool to capture those things we did not know, because we’re all IT guys, not business owners.

The bad thing was that this was the only place where we had some insight about what the user think or need, and what are their jargons and way to work. Our domain model did not express those things at all, so it was hard to get some clue about what that software was in the first place, because the code did not express the domain model, and worse, the domain model did not express the business case. We only started to have some clue after few meeting with the users, then we started to say “Eureka” this thing is that piece of code !