Eric Evans – software should solve a specific problem

The hour long video of Eric Evans’ talk at his Jan 2016 Domain Driven Design conference in Brussels is well worth watching. Online here.

One interesting point he makes is that software should be able to do some specific thing. That task is probably important and complex, otherwise you probably wouldn’t want software to do it.

There’s plenty of objects in the world which aren’t useful for anything (think about your tool box, or perhaps a few people come to mind). It’s much easier to be useless than useful, you could say.

If it is part of some big piece of complex software, as projects often are, it is good if you can somehow put a box around your project, to make sure everything within your box works and does something.

A few thoughts of my own to add – can modern software tools make it much faster to build software which does some specific thing – lowering the bar of how important or complex the task must be, to justify building software to do it?

For example – there might be many software tools which could help a police officer, which haven’t been built yet. Not transform his working life and cut crime but make a task easier, this sort of thing.

Eric Evans also says that it could be a much better time now (as in Jan 2016, when he gave the talk) for Domain Driven Design, than 2003, when he wrote his famous book about it. The software frameworks are much easier to work with, software is seen as more of a craft, there is a drive to solving problems.

These are interesting ideas.