Context Maps
Explore the concept of context maps in Domain Driven Design to understand how bounded contexts interact and communicate. Learn to identify types of relationships between contexts to avoid architectural pitfalls like the big ball of mud anti-pattern, ensuring clearer domain models and better collaboration across teams.
Bounded contexts are independent, but they do not work in isolation. They interact with each other to fulfill business requirements. Since a team usually works on a big domain, the team can end up with a huge number of bounded contexts. This is worth mentioning because every bounded context is translated into one or more modules or microservices in the future. It is difficult to understand the relationship between different microservices. If incorrectly implemented, our efficient architecture can devolve into a big ball of mud anti-pattern.
Big ball of mud anti-pattern
When there are many bounded contexts in an organization, it is important to manage the relationships between them. Unmanaged bounded context relationships lead to the formation of a big ball of mud. This is when a software solution possesses multiple haphazard models that do not work with explicit boundaries.A big ball of mud architecture can cause potential ...