Architectural Improvement by use of Strategic Level Domain-Driven Design

Development and enhancement of large scale enterprise systems is a daunting task where the practitioners easily are overwhelmed by complexity. Enterprise Architecture has been prescribed as a key tool to conquer complexity and align IT development with business priorities and strategies. In this paper we will recount the experience and lessons learned when the IT department in Statoil ASA, a large Oil and Gas company in Norway, applied strategic level Domain-Driven design to address the problems encountered in the gap between the logical applications defined by the enterprise architecture and the software architecture of the physical systems. The experience show that context maps and the process of context mapping provides insights that enable us to better scope new projects and to improve the architecture of existing systems in a controlled way. Distillation and identification of the core domain looks promising, but it requires the business to express explicitly the key problems that justify the project, and more experience is required before any conclusion can be made. Use of responsibility layers is interesting, but it suffers from the same problem as distillation: active business involvement. That said, our combination of responsibility layers and context maps resulted in interesting and fruitful discussions among the stakeholders.