Using Domain-Driven Design to Evaluate Commercial Off-The-Shelf software

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 we applied strategic domain-driven design principles to extend our Enterprise Architecture during evaluation of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf package solutions. We show how the Enterprise Architecture initial granularity was too coarse, and how the subsequent further work caused the enterprise architecture to be unmanageable. Furthermore, we show how we used strategic domain-driven design to explore our domain and turn implicit knowledge into explicit information using context maps and responsibility layers.

Einar Landre, Statoil ASA
Harald Wesenberg, Statoil ASA
Harald Ronneberg, Statoil ASA