Community DDD sessions, from systems thinking to team decisions.
Virtual Domain-driven design is the recorded output of an online community meetup. A guest presents, then organizers and attendees open the discussion up, on subjects that run from BDD automation and critical use of models to systems thinking and who actually gets to make the call on a team.
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Virtual Domain-driven design is what an online meetup sounds like once the stream has been recorded: talks, fireside chats and the odd experiment in format, all gathered around domain-driven design and the practices near it. The sessions are unvarnished. They can open with a quick check that the stream is working and close with someone figuring out, on air, how to stop it. In between, the substance is serious. A guest sets out an argument, then organizers and attendees take it further, picking up points from the chat and leaving comments and links on a shared board. The fireside chat 'Patterns of BDD Automation - a Fireside chat with Seb Rose and Gáspár Nagy' is a good first session. The argument there is that tools such as Cucumber keep getting used as plain test automation, and that the real return on BDD comes earlier. It comes from collaborating on discovery, working out a ubiquitous language with business stakeholders, and ending up with documentation the business can read for the life of the project. Trond Hjorteland's session goes more philosophical. He sets the billiard-ball picture of a single cause beside other root metaphors, formism and organicism among them, and shows how much of software engineering rests on reductionist, mechanical thinking, with waterfall and root cause analysis as examples and parts of DDD included. Rebecca's session on critically engaging with models comes at related ground from the organisational side. Models compete, she says, and one that fits a culture of hierarchy and control may not help somewhere with more of a cowboy streak. Her consulting stories lean political: people guarding their own importance, a colleague so efficient that others looked bad, and the gap between what an organisation says it values and what it does. Decision-making runs through several sessions. In 'Slow down to speed up your decision-making - Gien Verschatse', the practical questions are who, going up the hierarchy, can veto a team's decision, and why skimping on the problem statement makes meetings messy. Another session, run as an experiment, sets centralised against decentralised decision-making and talks through autocratic calls by architects, rank, and whether a team respects a ruling from someone who has the power to fire them. Quality gets the systems treatment too. One talk on systems thinking for sustainable quality argues that what you build shapes what quality means (a platform is not a pacemaker), and that slow deployment pushes teams into big batches, which widen the damage when something goes wrong. Christina from the organizers turns up in more than one session. There are community notes along the way, including pointers to a Discord, announcements of upcoming speakers and word of a move from Meetup to Humanitix. What a listener gets is less a lecture series than a seat at a practitioners' meetup, where ideas get tested against other people's experience as the discussion happens.
Made for: Suits a listener who already works with or around domain-driven design or BDD and wants to hear those practices argued over alongside systems thinking, organisational politics and how teams make decisions.
What sets it apart: It is not a produced interview show. It captures live community sessions, with questions from the chat worked in, and its range runs well past modelling technique into systems thinking and who holds decision power on a team.
If you don't live near an active Domain Driven Design meetup, or just want to get more in-depth knowledge of DDD, please join this vast growing community! Anyone is invited here.We strive to create a community of like-minded people eager to dive more into Domain Driven Design. We are going to organise panel discussions, community talks and more.So feel free to join us!
A test-quality meeting becomes a framework debate; now you can spot the missing problem statement.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Rebecca shows how models quietly shape judgment, behavior, and power inside organizations.
Rebecca frames models as the quiet machinery behind critical engagement: they help people act, judge, and make sense of the world, while always leaving something outside the frame.
BDD works best before automation, when teams discover the domain together and leave behind documentation people can still read.
"Patterns of BDD automation" treats behavior-driven development as something that begins well before Given-When-Then lines are handed to a tool.
A grounded guide to framing technical decisions before architecture debates drift.
Slow decision-making is treated here as a craft problem rather than a personality flaw. The review-worthy strength is the focus on authority and scope: teams are pushed to name who can veto a decision, agree on the problem being solved, and keep alternatives from taking over too…
A loose design conversation turns a cloud move and a proposed shift to Kotlin into a study of authority and respect.
Decentralised and centralised decision-making are treated as a practical design question in this PlayNext episode, shaped by a loose conversation with Andrea and Christina from the Virtual DDD organisers.
Power Platform news with practical static.
Rebecca argues that models are never neutral because they leave things out, name the world, and shape behavior, from the five stages of grief to Team Topologies.
["Gaspar Nagy says the book began as a SpecFlow idea, moved into Manning\u2019s MEAP program, and is now called Effective Behavior Driven Development.", "Sepp Rose says the project had to cover BDD, discovery, and formulation before it could get to automation patterns.", "The speakers describe patterns as context-based recipes with consequences, citing Christopher Alexander, PLoP, and EuroPLoP.", "They argue about anti-patterns, backstage setup, test logging, and why BDD\u2019s value comes from collaboration and business-readable documentation rather than tooling."]
["Trond Hjorteland uses Virtual DDDs to argue that systems thinking starts with the whole, not the parts, and ties the talk to \"happy people in modern and humane organizations create quality digital products.\"", "He says GraphQL, Kubernetes, Next.js, capability mapping, and bounded contexts can pull teams into reductionism, where a revenue problem gets treated as a revenue-only problem.", "He keeps coming back to Eikhoff, Paul Silius, Agile, Scrum, the five whys, and the car analogy to show how local optimization and root-cause hunting can miss the system.", "The later section moves into open systems, Dave Snowden, Andres Agiar, and Steven Pepper's formism examples with oranges, basketballs, tigers, horses, and zebras."]
Hien Verschatse opens Virtual DDD's October edition with a talk on slowing down problem framing so decision making gets faster, and she says she works at Artling in architecture and domain modeling.
["Virtual Domain-driven design uses a live format change to explore the paradox between centralized and decentralized decision-making.", "Andrea, Kenny, and Christina compare Andrew\u2019s decision-style model, Rebecca Britt Rock\u2019s model lens, and Team Topologies language for architecture and flow.", "The discussion turns on concrete examples: an \u201civory tower\u201d architecture group, the advice process, and a CTO pushing Kenny\u2019s team from C# to Kotlin.", "Christina and Kenny keep returning to transparency, factual reasons, decision tables, and what self-organization means when budget cuts or hiring freezes hit."]
Anne-Marie Charette, an engineering futurist at Telstra and author of The Quality Coaches Handbook, examines why software that meets requirements can still fail to be fit for purpose.
Joachim Sundén recounts how Spotify developed Discover Weekly while the company grew from fewer than 10 teams in Stockholm to more than 200 teams across Boston, San Francisco, and New York.
In Virtual Domain-driven design, Dr.
Hazel Wheatley uses the metaphor of abstractions as bridges to explain how engineering teams can move from shared concepts to complex systems.
Agile coach Gitte Klitgaard discusses her journey with psychological safety and its importance in remote collaboration.
A panel discussion with the authors of the Remote Facilitator's Pocket Guide about their book and a related facilitation course.
A panel discussion on improving modeling with Behavior-Driven Development, featuring experts Matt and Steve, hosted by Sepp.
Thierry de Pauw discusses how feature branching impacts domain-driven design in a meetup conversation.