Context map

The context map helps you to understand the overall picture of a large enterprise application. It shows how many bounded contexts are present in the enterprise model, and how they are interrelated. Therefore, we can say that any diagram or document that explains the bounded contexts and relationship between them is called a context map.

Context maps help all team members, whether they are on the same team or in a different team, to understand the high-level enterprise model in the form of various parts (bounded context or submodels) and relationships.

This gives inpiduals a clearer picture about the tasks one performs, and may allow him or her to raise any concern/question about the model's integrity:

Context map example

The context map example diagram is a sample of a context map. Here, Table1 and Table2 both appear in the Table Reservation Context and also in the Restaurant Ledger Context. The interesting thing is that Table1 and Table2 have their own respective concept in each bounded context. Here, ubiquitous language is used to name the bounded context as table reservation and restaurant ledger.

In the following section, we will explore a few patterns that can be used to define the communication between different contexts in the context map.