Dissecting Bounded Contexts
Nick Tune at DDD Europe 2020
There are many attributes that define bounded contexts. Some bounded contexts are characterised by their business value - the infamous core domains. Other bounded contexts are characterised by their dependency relationships - like octopus contexts, or their relationship to legacy parts of the system - like bubble contexts.
When you study many domains and software systems, you discover more and more attributes that define bounded contexts. There are at-least 50, possibly even hundreds. You also start to see that attributes cluster giving rise to design patterns - like engagement contexts, and evolutionary transformations - like slice-and-scale.
Being able to dissect bounded contexts and deeply analyse their many characteristics - related to business value, domain complexity, technical implementation and social influence - helps you to see more and better modelling options when designing and evolving bounded contexts.
Don’t limit yourself to a few naive attributes like size, similarity, or naming patterns. Learn how to dissect every aspect of bounded contexts, and learn the patterns that demonstrate common and exotic clusterings of behaviours.
Nick is a technical leader who embraces every aspect of discovering, designing and continuously delivering high-scale software systems to growing and leading highly-autonomous software engineering organisations. He has been a practitioner of DDD for almost a decade, and is the co-author of two books: Patterns, Principles and Practices of DDD (Wrox), and Designing Autonomous Teams and Services (O’Reilly).
When you study many domains and software systems, you discover more and more attributes that define bounded contexts. There are at-least 50, possibly even hundreds. You also start to see that attributes cluster giving rise to design patterns - like engagement contexts, and evolutionary transformations - like slice-and-scale.
Being able to dissect bounded contexts and deeply analyse their many characteristics - related to business value, domain complexity, technical implementation and social influence - helps you to see more and better modelling options when designing and evolving bounded contexts.
Don’t limit yourself to a few naive attributes like size, similarity, or naming patterns. Learn how to dissect every aspect of bounded contexts, and learn the patterns that demonstrate common and exotic clusterings of behaviours.
Nick is a technical leader who embraces every aspect of discovering, designing and continuously delivering high-scale software systems to growing and leading highly-autonomous software engineering organisations. He has been a practitioner of DDD for almost a decade, and is the co-author of two books: Patterns, Principles and Practices of DDD (Wrox), and Designing Autonomous Teams and Services (O’Reilly).