Adaptive Systems with Domain-Driven Design, Wardley Maps, and Team Topologies: Designing Architecture for Flow

Vaughn Vernon Signature Book

by Susanne Kaiser

In a world of relentless change and accelerating uncertainty, organizations must continuously adapt and evolve to compete in environments they never anticipated. This requires upfront design for adaptability, and closer business alignment of software systems and team structures. To succeed, organizations must integrate advanced techniques from business strategy, software architecture, and team organization. Now, independent technology consultant Susanne Kaiser introduces a powerful unified toolset you can use to design, build, and evolve adaptive software systems and teams that are optimized for ever-faster rates of change.

Kaiser shows how to combine Wardley Maps, Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and Team Topologies to understand your problem domain more clearly, focus on your crucial core subdomain, and reflect the dynamics of your business landscape. Using these tools, you'll learn how to design evolvable services within an adaptive system, which is in turn owned by a team organization that optimizes for fast flow.

Kaiser goes beyond Domain Driven Design's popular patterns to reveal how DDDenables strategic design for long-term business success. Her accessible explanations and practical examples show how to combine DDD with intuitive Wardley Maps and powerful Team Topologies to improve success across the full lifecycle: strategy, design, implementation, deployment, operation, and evolution. As she demystifies and demonstrates these tools, Kaiser answers the most important questions faced by project participants--from CxOs to architects to software developers.

Genres: Architecture, Programming, Technology, Software, Engineering, Crafts, Management

400 pages, Paperback

Published December 7, 2023

Reviews

[Tom Winstanley · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been a while since I have read an enterprise architecture practice book and a very long time since I read one I enjoyed. For whatever reason, this genre of book tends to be either high framework or unstructured case studies wrapped up up in a concept or two.. “Architecture for flow: adaptive systems with domain driven design, Wardley mapping and team topologies”, by Susanne Kaiser, may not have the most promising of titles, but balances the content mix between concept and application well and is well worth a read if you are involved in enterprise wide technology transformation.

Do as really need another book in this space? I am certainly not anti-TOGAF, ISO-42010 and all of those stakeholder views from “classical” enterprise architecture, but I find that as frameworks they are typically one step too far removed from the context of the problem domain to do anything but frame and describe the architecture, so fail to support the architect with appropriate patterns and directional support. Similarly, despite - perhaps somewhat unfashionably today - still being convinced of most of the underpinnings of agile architecture approaches, I find they too often underplay the role of more systemic thinking models. Kaiser’s book deftly addresses both concerns by building on the open agile architecture model and thinking around domain driven design with the superbly simple, yet frustratingly challenging Wardley Mapping approach and the now classic Team Topologies models for organising and optimising for flow in software engineering.

I was really impressed by two facets of this book:
1. Kaiser managed to bring together the models into an authentic whole, which shows how you can use Wardley Maps to understand the strategic landscape of an organisation, identify differentiators for product and service design and then decompose these into an actionable set of architectural components using domain-driven design techniques and - crucially - to then make sense of what to build, what to outsource, what to architect for continuous change and what to invest in for the future
2. In parallel, she creates a coherent bridge between Wardley’s culture mindsets ( “explorers”, “villagers” and “town- planners”) and Skelton and Pais’ team topologies, recognising that they are related but adjacent concepts rather than just smashing them together - arguably, this could create a more useful framing for scaled agile organisational operating models than the eponymous “SAFe” equivalent!

There is not much to criticise in this book, in my opinion, but I think that there is real potential to build on this with further work and writing to expand the applicability of the organising model and the domain driven design more comprehensively out of the IT “enterprise” architecture niche to the true business domain - Wardley maps are already firmly out there well beyond the technology space for systems thinkers and strategists willing to invest some time, but there is much from “DDD” and team topologies that could and should be permeating the commercial and business design and strategy units of organisations. A fantastic companion book would be a workbook with more scaled examples of application; the contrived model single product organisation running events brings the models to life but is still quite a way from most messy enterprise multi-product brownfield operations!

I very much look forward to the continuation of this series!

[Christoph Kappel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good combination of all these different ideas and perfect to get a brief overview. There are so many references to other good books like Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow or Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software and I highly suggest to read all of them, to really make sense of some of the ideas here.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A smorgasbord of techniques, brought together into a holistic whole. There's a lot of great ideas in here, almost too many! The central premise of bringing wardley mapping, together with domain driven design, and then using the combination to layer team topologies atop is excellent. Its easy to read about these topics in isolation, but to actually benefit from them takes systems thinking (a topic that hovers in the background through out, could have done with more foreground time), and put them all to real use is great. The case study is really needed to so that, but feels a bit dry and repetitive by that point.

Overall a valuable addition to the book shelf!