Category Archives: distributed systems

On Measuring Software Design

Good design leads to good engineering quality and products that are useful, fun to use, simple, efficient and safe. But what is a good design? Is it purely subjective and opinionated or are there specific attributes of a design that lend themselves to introspection and measurement? Why measure? Measuring helps us quantify something at a…More

Iterative Domain Model Design: How to stay autonomous

One key question that I hear with Domain Modelling is how do you know if you have your transaction boundary right (so that you build the right aggregate)?  Hidden in this is another question – what if we got our domain aggregate wrong? We can take this further and ask In an agile world, given change…More

Domain Driven Design (DDD): Core concepts and Enterprise Architecture

If you are building or designing APIs, Microservices or integrating systems then Domain Driven Design (DDD) offers a valuable design technique for mapping business domains to build software services of value Using DDD is incredibly useful when designing services because it helps you rationalise the granularity of your software, the ownership boundaries and model interactions…More

DDD Context Mapping By Example: Customer Management and Customer 360

In the continuation from the previous post, here we look at how to do context mapping from sample real-world examples. In this post we look at how to model Customer Management from a customer support perspective and how Customer 360 would look like as a context map With this post, I hope to give you…More

DDD Context Mapping by example: Policy Management

DDD context mapping can be confusing without real-world examples. In this post we will model sample implementations for two scenarios using bounded context maps and learn to analyse the relationships from the maps. With this post, I hope to give you a fair idea of how to do apply DDD into build good distributed features…More

3 Key Asynchronous Communication Patterns: Ways to talk offline

When integrating systems we often end-up writing asynchronous messaging interfaces for mostly system-to-system communications. This conversation technique is great because it does not require the sender and receiver to stay connected to each other in a session at the same instance in time, is non-blocking and you can make it reliable through message persistence, incremental…More

From Project to Product Teams: Implementing the Inverse Conway Move for better Software

Modern software engineering techniques within organisations deliver “distributed features” using agile techniques. These features are distributed across different systems and integrated to provide an end-to-end experience. Traditional project delivery brings in  members from different system oriented teams to deliver these features in a loose and ad-hoc fashion and dis-bands the team after a project is…More

Tackling complexity: Using Process maps to improve visibility of integrated system features

“Entropy always increases “– second law of thermodynamics Enterprise systems are similar to isolated physical systems, where the entropy or hidden-information always increases. As the business grows, our technology footprint grows as new systems are implemented, new products and cross-functional features are imagined and an amazing network of integrations emerge Knowing how information flows and…More