Domain-Driven Design in Practice: A Mining Study of Maintenance and Evolution in Open-Source Repositories

2026-06-22

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of large-scale empirical evidence on the practical application, evolution, and impact on maintenance quality of Domain-Driven Design (DDD) in open-source projects. Through a pre-registered empirical approach combining the GitHub Search API, keyword filtering, manual assessment, and longitudinal commit history analysis, the work systematically investigates the distribution, co-occurrence, and evolution of DDD tactical building blocks, as well as violations of bounded context boundaries. It provides the first large-scale quantitative evidence of the prevalence of such boundary violations and establishes a temporal association between the evolution of DDD building blocks and software maintenance activities. These findings offer crucial empirical grounding for improving DDD tooling and refining its practical adoption.

Abstract

Domain-Driven Design (DDD) is an influential software development methodology that structures software around business domain complexity through tactical building blocks such as Entities, Value Objects, Aggregates, and Repositories. Despite its prominence in software engineering, large-scale empirical evidence on how DDD is practiced, how it evolves, and how it relates to software maintenance quality in open-source projects remains scarce. This study presents a pre-registered empirical investigation of the distribution, evolution, and maintenance implications of DDD tactical building blocks in open-source GitHub repositories, addressing the call for large-scale empirical evaluations identified in a recent systematic literature review. We will collect DDD-related repositories from GitHub using the Search API, apply automated keyword filtering and manual relevance assessment, and analyze the resulting dataset through four research questions covering: (RQ1) the static distribution and co-usage of DDD building blocks across repository types, (RQ2) their longitudinal evolution over commit history, (RQ3) the extent and maintenance implications of Bounded Context boundary violations (the primary technical challenge in DDD adoption, unquantified at scale), and (RQ4) the temporal association between maintenance activities and building block churn or Bounded Context violations in DDD repositories. Together, these RQs trace the full maintenance and evolution lifecycle of open-source DDD projects and establish an empirical foundation for future DDD tool support and methodology refinement.

Problem

• Domain-Driven Design
• open-source repositories
• software maintenance
• Bounded Context
• empirical study

Innovation

• Domain-Driven Design
• Bounded Context violations
• empirical study
• software maintenance
• open-source evolution