As I delve further into the world of Domain Driven Design and it's related toolset, I find that there is quite a large arena of tools available to make your life easier. Some of these tools are:
- NUnit - For Test Driven Development
- NMock - For creating mock objects to use in tests
- NHibernate - O/R Mapper for persisting objects to the relational model
- ReSharper - For refactoring support
- NUnitAsp - For testing your web frontend (haven't used this one too much yet)
- TestDriven.Net - NUnit integration into VisualStudio GUI
- Design Patterns - For reusable code, and to easily communicate the domain model
- Other Patterns - Supervising Controller, Passive View, etc...
And the list goes on and on.
My main question I'm getting at here that I haven't really found on anyone else's blog is, When are you using too many tools?
I hear time and time again on podcasts and blogs that there is definately a stage when you use more tools and your productivity suffers for it, but I guess I have yet to hit that point. I mean, does one have to be using 20 different tools for that to happen?
What I'm trying to get at is, does the maximum number of tools to be used differ per domain? or is it the same cap for all domain problems? What pitfalls should newcomers look out for when attempting to steer clear of overusing your tools?
These are some questions I'm pondering at the moment, because as they say...Too much of a good thing, is definately bad. Now, all I have to do is define “Too much” =)
Cheers!
Sean Chambers