Journey 1: Our Domain: The Contoso Conference Management System

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The Contoso Corporation | Who is coming with us on the journey? | The Contoso Conference Management System | Beginning the journey

The starting point: Where have we come from, what are we taking, and who is coming with us?

"I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward." David Livingstone

This chapter introduces a fictitious company named Contoso. It describes Contoso's plans to launch the Contoso Conference Management System, a new online service that will enable other companies or individuals to organize and manage their own conferences and events. This chapter describes, at a high-level, some of the functional and non-functional requirements of the new system, and why Contoso wants to implement parts of it using the Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) pattern and event sourcing (ES). As with any company considering this process, there are many issues to consider and challenges to be met, particularly because this is the first time Contoso has used both the CQRS pattern and event sourcing. The chapters that follow show, step by step, how Contoso designed and built its conference management application.

This chapter also introduces a panel of fictional experts to comment on the development efforts.

The Contoso Corporation

Contoso is a startup ISV company of approximately 20 employees that specializes in developing solutions using Microsoft technologies. The developers at Contoso are knowledgeable about various Microsoft products and technologies, including the .NET Framework, ASP.NET MVC, and Microsoft Azure. Some of the developers have previous experience using the domain-driven design (DDD) approach, but none of them have used the CQRS pattern previously.

The Conference Management System application is one of the first innovative online services that Contoso wants to take to market. As a startup, Contoso wants to develop and launch these services with a minimal investment in hardware and IT personnel. Contoso wants to be quick to market in order to start growing market share, and cannot afford the time to implement all of the planned functionality in the first releases. Therefore, it is important that the architecture it adopts can easily accommodate changes and enhancements with minimal impact on existing users of the system. Contoso has chosen to deploy the application on Azure in order to take advantage of its ability to scale applications as demand grows.

Who is coming with us on the journey?

As mentioned earlier, this guide and the accompanying RI describe a CQRS journey. A panel of experts will comment on our development efforts as we go. This panel includes a CQRS expert, a software architect, a developer, a domain expert, an IT Pro, and a business manager. They will all comment from their own perspectives.

	Gary is a CQRS expert. He ensures that a CQRS-based solution will work for a company and will provide tangible benefits. He is a cautious person, for good reason. "Defining the CQRS pattern is easy. Realizing the benefits that implementing the CQRS pattern can offer is not always so straightforward."
	Jana is a software architect. She plans the overall structure of an application. Her perspective is both practical and strategic. In other words, she considers not only what technical approaches are needed today, but also what direction a company needs to consider for the future. Jana has worked on projects that used the domain-driven design approach. "It's not easy to balance the needs of the company, the users, the IT organization, the developers, and the technical platforms we rely on."
	Markus is a software developer who is new to the CQRS pattern. He is analytical, detail-oriented, and methodical. He's focused on the task at hand, which is building a great application. He knows that he's the person who's ultimately responsible for the code. "I don't care what architecture you want to use for the application; I'll make it work."
	Carlos is the domain expert. He understands all the ins and outs of conference management. He has worked in a number of organizations that help people run conferences. He has also worked in a number of different roles: sales and marketing, conference management, and consultant. "I want to make sure that the team understands how this business works so that we can deliver a world-class online conference management system."
	Poe is an IT professional who's an expert in deploying and running applications in the cloud. Poe has a keen interest in practical solutions; after all, he's the one who gets paged at 3:00 AM when there's a problem. "Running complex applications in the cloud involves challenges that are different than the challenges in managing on-premises applications. I want to make sure our new conference management system meets our published service-level agreements (SLA)."
	Beth is a business manager. She helps companies to plan how their business will develop. She understands the market that the company operates in, the resources that the company has available, and the goals of the company. She has both a strategic view and an interest in the day-to-day operations of the company. "Organizations face many conflicting demands on their resources. I want to make sure that our company balances those demands and adopts a business plan that will make us successful in the medium and long term."

If you have a particular area of interest, look for notes provided by the specialists whose interests align with yours.

The Contoso Conference Management System

This section describes the Contoso Conference Management System as the team envisaged it at the start of the journey. The team has not used the CQRS pattern before; therefore, the system that is delivered at the end of our journey may not match this description exactly because:

• What we learn as we go may impact what we ultimately deliver.
• Because this is a learning journey, it is more difficult to estimate what we can achieve in the available time.

Overview of the system

Contoso plans to build an online conference management system that will enable its customers to plan and manage conferences that are held at a physical location. The system will enable Contoso's customers to:

• Manage the sale of different seat types for the conference.
• Create a conference and define characteristics of that conference.

The Contoso Conference Management System will be a multi-tenant, cloud-hosted application. Business customers will need to register with the system before they can create and manage their conferences.

Selling seats for a conference

The business customer defines the number of seats available for the conference. The business customer may also specify events at a conference such as workshops, receptions, and premium sessions for which attendees must have a separate ticket. The business customer also defines how many seats are available for these events.

The system manages the sale of seats to ensure that the conference and sub-events are not oversubscribed. This part of the system will also operate wait-lists so that if other attendees cancel, their seats can be reallocated.

The system will require that the names of the attendees be associated with the purchased seats so that an on-site system can print badges for the attendees when they arrive at the conference.

Creating a conference

A business customer can create new conferences and manage information about the conference such as its name, description, and dates. The business customer can also make a conference visible on the Contoso Conference Management System website by publishing it, or hide it by unpublishing it.

Additionally, the business customer defines the seat types and available quantity of each seat type for the conference.

Contoso also plans to enable the business customer to specify the following characteristics of a conference:

• Whether the paper submission process will require reviewers.
• What the fee structure for paying Contoso will be.
• Who key personnel, such as the program chair and the event planner, will be.

Nonfunctional requirements

Contoso has two major nonfunctional requirements for its conference management system—scalability and flexibility—and it hopes that the CQRS pattern will help it meet them.

Scalability

The conference management system will be hosted in the cloud; one of the reasons Contoso chose a cloud platform was its scalability and potential for elastic scalability.

Although cloud platforms such as Azure enable you to scale applications by adding (or removing) role instances, you must still design your application to be scalable. By splitting responsibility for the application's read and write operations into separate objects, the CQRS pattern allows Contoso to split those operations into separate Azure roles that can scale independently of each other. This recognizes the fact that for many applications, the number of read operations vastly exceeds the number of write operations. This gives Contoso the opportunity to scale the conference management system more efficiently, and make better use of the Azure role instances it uses.

Flexibility

The market that the Contoso Conference Management System operates in is very competitive, and very fast moving. In order to compete, Contoso must be able to quickly and cost effectively adapt the conference management system to changes in the market. This requirement for flexibility breaks down into a number of related aspects:

• Contoso must be able to evolve the system to meet new requirements and to respond to changes in the market.

  Beth Says:
  	Contoso plans to compete by being quick to respond to changes in the market and to changing customer requirements. Contoso must be able to evolve the system quickly and painlessly.

  - The system must be able to run multiple versions of its software simultaneously in order to support customers who are in the middle of a conference and who do not wish to upgrade to a new version immediately. Other customers may wish to migrate their existing conference data to a new version of the software as it becomes available.

  Poe Says:
  	This is a big challenge: keeping the system running for all our customers while we perform upgrades with no down time.

  - Contoso intends the software to last for at least five years. It must be able to accommodate significant changes over that period. - Contoso does not want the complexity of some parts of the system to become a barrier to change. - Contoso would like to be able to use different developers for different elements of the system, using cheaper developers for simpler tasks and restricting its use of more expensive and experienced developers to the more critical aspects of the system.

  Gary Says:
  	There is some debate in the CQRS community about whether, in practice, you can use different development teams for different parts of the CQRS pattern implementation.

  Beginning the journey

  The next chapter is the start of our CQRS journey. It provides more information about the Contoso Conference Management System and describes some of the high-level parts of the system. Subsequent chapters describe the stages of the journey as Contoso implements the conference management system.

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