In a diverse and multilingual workforce, effective communication is crucial for delivering quality software. In this master’s thesis, you will address the challenges in the pension sector where professionals from various backgrounds and languages must collaborate. Your goal is to develop guidelines that help teams maintain a consistent business language, avoiding misunderstandings and unnecessary rework. This research will build on the concept of ubiquitous language from Domain-Driven Design, aiming to provide strategies for managing language within diverse teams.

💡Areas of Interest: Business Analysis, Requirements Gathering, IT Enabling, Domain-Driven Design

This master’s thesis is part of the ‘Van GRIJSpensioen naar GROENpensioen‘ graduation project. With this project, we are giving the pension industry a digital boost by optimizing digital infrastructures and processes. In doing so, we are making pension funds more efficient and sustainable, with better data management, strong privacy protection, and personalized services.

In order to deliver good software, it is vital that people working towards a goal understand each other. In the pension branch, we see people with different backgrounds (e.g. developers, business analysts, communications experts, legal counsel, financial controllers). Additionally, they have different native languages, as the Dutch workforce is increasingly international (Dutch-speaking in NL, English-speaking in NL, English-speaking but near-/off-shored). What’s more, Dutch speakers are using more and more English words in their Dutch speech. This quickly leads to business contexts being discussed by many different people in many different ways and languages, with different terms. Using different terms to mean the same thing, or the same terms to mean something different, is a disaster for shared understanding, and leads to unnecessary rework waiting to happen.

The Assignment

This assignment focuses on the dynamic world of pensions. With all of the changes and reforms currently ongoing, it is vital that subject-matter experts and developers can understand each other well enough to collaborate on innovative solutions.

The goal of this assignment is to offer guidelines to Info Support’s customers to deal with language in their diverse workforces. How can they make sure everybody involved in a project keeps speaking the same language, without resorting to a “language police” correcting everyone all of the time? Languages evolve, so how is the language of the organization kept up to date? Who has the authority over this, and how can members in the organization stay aware of the newest changes? How do we make sure the code adheres to the business language as much as possible?

The concept of the ubiquitous language as described in Eric Evans’ book “Domain-Driven Design” is at the core of this thesis. While the book stresses the importance of a ubiquitous language that is spoken by all those involved, it lacks concrete strategies to maintain and evolve this language. The ubiquitous language is only a part of domain-driven design, but it has so many complexities on its own that it would benefit from guidelines for practitioners.

The analysis done in this thesis should lead to guidelines and processes to continuously manage the domain language used between developers and subject matter experts, even in diverse contexts. The author should incorporate perspectives of language, psychology (shared understanding), and software development frameworks.

About Info Support

Info Support specializes in custom software, data/AI solutions, management, and training and is active in the Finance, Industry, Agriculture, Food & Retail, Mobility & Public, and Healthcare sectors. We provide solid and innovative solutions for complex and critical software issues. Our headquarters are located in Veenendaal (NL) and Mechelen (BE). At present, approximately 500 employees are employed by Info Support.

Info Support's working method is characterized by a number of core values: solidity, integrity, craftsmanship, and passion. These core values are intertwined in our work and the way we interact with each other.

To ensure that all employees are always up to date with the latest developments, Info Support has an in-house knowledge center that eagerly satisfies the hunger for more or different knowledge and skills.

B2 language proficiency in Dutch is required.