Ubiquitous Language
Strategic pattern to address Linguistic Challenges
Business terms
To gain knowledge of the domain one MUST understand the language used by the domain experts
Teams within enterprise have their own lingo. Business domain experts use the team’s language in all their communication with the IT teams.
Language related challenges:
- Multiple business languages across the enterprise
- Conflicting meaning of terms across domains. In the illustraton below you see same term “Credit” used in two domains; meaning for the term is different depending on the domain.
- Technology teams tend to translate business terms to IT lingo. As a result Software doesn’t reflect domain’s terms; loss of meaning & confusion due to back & forth translation between IT <> Domain.
Ubiquitous Language
Domain Driven Design suggests setting up a common language within each business context; this language is used by ALL stakeholders.
Ubiquitous = Constantly encountered or seen
- Not the business language imposed by experts
- Not the language used in the industry
Ubiquitous Language is developed collaboratively by the business experts and the IT teams.
It is used in all forms of communications and software assets.
Ubiquitous Language helps in breaking the business context into smaller parts; in DDD these smaller parts are referred to as the Bounded Context