Context Maps

Bounded contexts are independent, but they do not work isolated. They interact with each other to fulfill business requirements. Since a team usually works on a big domain, they can end up dealing with a huge number of bounded contexts. It is worth mentioning because every bounded context will be translated into one or more modules or microservices in the future. Understanding the relationship between microservices is difficult and tends to lead to 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 relationships between them. Unmanaged bounded context relationships lead to creating a big ball of mud. This is where a solution of software has multiple haphazard models without explicit boundaries. It will cause potential problems such as building a spaghetti code where a team will have to connect components improperly. Evolving components and a model will be difficult and expensive.