Ubiquitous Language, simplified

💪 Ubiquitous Language is yet another fancy term for a simple idea, for such an important concept! Learn how you can start applying this best-practice in your team. It's a straight-forward but very powerful mindshift! 🧠
0:00 Intro
0:28 What is Ubiquitous Language?
2:32 Why is it useful?
5:22 How to get started

[@raptorix]

Great Video, I have seen several times that using bad Language resulting in big problems, in a recent case I noticed that developers were using contractid and consumerid very loosely, then when the project was ready to be released a use case came up from someone who had multiple contracts (a private and a business one), however everywhere in the database the relation between consumer and contract was 1-1 instead of 1-n, in the end it costed us 2 additional sprints to fix this, and it could have been easily avoided if we agreed on more clear language. Another one, which you see a lot is that there is no clarity about language/country, at the start usually not a big issue, but when a project evolves it often becomes clear that a wrong structure is costly to fix.

[@TristanDraaisma]

Great stuff Bran, as a Product Owner I always insist on empathy with the user, also from the development team (and vice versa) this really helps. I tried building a glossary for the product team and client, never thought it could be implemented into the code.

[@jannismain]

Thanks for yet another gem of a video. As a senior software engineer your videos help me communicate the things I treasure in simple terms for everyone to understand, which can be a real super power ☺ btw: congrats pronouncing “ubiquitous language” 3x in a row without messing up… 😅

[@lpanebr]

1:27 already fell in love with it! I've been trying to implement this for the longest time without success and this thing even has a name! 🤦

[@Cleanblue1990]

How would you approach it, when the customer does not speak English? Start to use Spanisch or German vocabulary in your code? I recently decided to use the foreign abbreviations, as everybody involved uses them in discussions, but opted for English terms where the translation is self evident.

[@branvandermeer]

I've experienced teams which speak and code in a local language, and have only had devs who speak that language; While this is possible for a while, as companies and products grow, sooner or later you need to attract international talent, unless you work for a government agency. I think it's always better to have a list of english domain terms for that reason. Will you really never hire a person who doesn't speak the language, really? You likely need to switch to english at some point, might as well start having both languages in your glossary and english in your code. It's also a form of inclusivity I think. But it does require the domain experts to be on board with those english terms as well.

[@lpanebr]

Good question and I face that exact problem. I guess having a multilingual glossary that always includes English and agreeing to use English in the code would be the way. This would allow the sales and mkt teams to interface (see what I did there?) with clients and users in their language while developers use English. But obviously it's much harder to start and maintain...

[@nUrnxvmhTEuU]

It's pronounced "you-bee-quit-us" /juːˈbɪkwətəs/, not "you-bee-queue-eet-us"

[@branvandermeer]

Thanks, you're perfectly right!