In Domain-Driven Design (DDD), business domains and sub-domains exist in the problem space and bounded contexts exist in the future state. Foundational to creating your organization’s future-state architecture is identifying the bounded contexts based on your business model and describing how messages flow between them to support key user journeys and value streams.
Exactly how to design bounded contexts has historically been equal parts art and science. There is not one right way to get from domains to contexts that everyone agrees on, so practitioners often figure out for themselves or hire consultants to help. I’ve been fixated on designing bounded contexts for the last few years by building on the work of the ddd-crew, investing in team training with Nick Tune, and refining practices on real client projects with my SingleStone team as seen in InfoQ.
Today, I’m happy to announce we’ve published our newest Miro template, DDD: Design Bounded Contexts. It presents our repeatable way for your teams to collaboratively design bounded contexts and message flows by starting with the current state event storms describing key user journeys.
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Like all templates in our DDD series, this one includes:
- Two and three-hour agendas for team workshops to identify bounded contexts and describe message flows
- Workshop roles and step-by-step instructions for running engaging team workshops
- Real-world examples and helpful hints for success
This new template builds on the initial set we published last month describing the Domain-Driven Discovery approach, including templates for problem framing, discovering user journeys with event storms, and systems with C4 model. These are collectively used to describe the current state for organizations starting their architecture modernization journey and are inputs into this new template for designing a future state architecture aligned to your business model.
Hopefully, these templates will help your teams create domain-driven future state architectures in ways that are fun and engaging. If you want help getting started on your architecture modernization journey or getting un-stuck, let’s chat.