Domain-driven points out that a business drives results through investments in knowledge acquisition within and beyond its current sphere of influence and activity. The business drives its own advancement and growth through steady improvements in its technology-based products. This book continually asserts that it is learning through

So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big thing is. There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’” —Steve Jobs

The greatest innovations have come from relentless experimentation coupled with continuous improvement.

When the team has decided on modules first, and when deployment options start out as simple as possible, that approach puts them on solid ground to make decisions based on empirical information at the most responsible time.

Modularity is an indispensable foundation for Conway’s Law as well. That’s because modules are where we should capture critical communication and what is learned from it. At the same time, modules can save teams from smearing mud all over their solution space. Modules are used both as conceptual boundaries and as physical compartments.

In the end, making some decisions early on is irresponsible. For example, settling upfront on architecture, such as using Microservices, or trying to create generalized solutions and modeling abstractions, is wrong. These decisions should be postponed until we prove that those choices are justified and necessary.

This is a good place to introduce the idea of using an engineering model approach to software development as opposed to the contractor model. First consider the typical contractor model. Under this model, whether used by employees or actual contractors, developers must be given accurate tasks to work on, and they must not fail in even small ways.

A business capability answers the “What?” question regarding the means by which the company will generate revenues. A substantive question with regard to a business capability is “How?” Impact Mapping, discussed in Chapter 2 in the section “Strategic Delivery on Purpose,” explains driving software deliverables starting with the question “Why?” By

Planning too far ahead will lead to conflicts in goals and execution. Going too far too fast can lead to purposely overlooking debt or forgetting to record it. When under heavy pressure, the team might fail to care for debt sooner than later.