Common Process Challenges When Breaking Monoliths

3 difficult challenges that we often come across when our team works with clients as they try to break monoliths:

1. Silver Bullets - Enterprises have been burnt by vendor solutions that promise migration with a tool like BPM or some silver bullet methodology that promises seamless migration. The Truth is that disentangling your monolith's code and data is going to get messy. The entire business process will need to be disaggregated, visualized and seams will need to be identified to create a blueprint for a target architecture. Other than Pivotal/VMware there is no one else who has done this at enterprise scale. Our approach modernizes the monolith incrementally with demonstrated business value in weeks not years. 

2. Over Engineering - It is common to get distracted by technology choices and deployment options rather than focus on the difficult work of understanding the core domain. Identifying the business capabilities and assessing if they are core or supporting domains. Do what is sustainable and what your average (not rockstar) software engineers can support and focus on the outcomes.

3. Pressure Cooker:  When clients continuously keep changing their priorities or lose faith in the progress or micromanage the design then it subverts the process and the target architecture looks like the old system.  Breaking monoliths with Domain Driven Design is like landing the plane from 30,000 feet. You cannot skip phases and go straight to user story backlog generation with somebody else's domain model or DDD process. Don't short circuit steps in the process.  It is critical to follow the strategic and tactical patterns and land the plane with gradual descent to an organized user story backlog.  

also checkout Eight Pitfalls Of Application Modernization (m11n) when Practicing Domain Driven Design (DDD)