DDD Alley: Create Observability, Part 2: Capture “Tribal Knowledge”

“Tribal knowledge” is information that should be written down but isn’t. If it were easy to write down, it probably already would be! Another common problem is with documentation quickly becoming obsolete. This month we’ll see a specific technique for helping a specific area of “tribal knowledge”. Our business processes run in phases according to the calendar. We’ll use the fact that we have a spring season followed by tournaments as our example. Our tournament software assumes the regular season has finished. That makes sense for the production software but can be a problem when developing a feature during the off-season. The software configuration may not be correct for that feature to work in that developer’s environment. What setup is needed to make feature development possible? That’s something we don’t have written down! Here’s a solution.