Domain-specific Language and Tools for Strategic Domain-driven Design, Context Mapping and Bounded Context Modeling

Stefan Kapferer, Olaf Zimmermann

2020

Abstract

Service-oriented architectures and microservices have gained much attention in recent years; companies adopt these concepts and supporting technologies in order to increase agility, scalability, and maintainability of their systems. Decomposing an application into multiple independently deployable, appropriately sized services and then integrating such services is challenging. With strategic patterns such as Bounded Context and Context Map, Domain-driven Design (DDD) can support business analysts, (enterprise) architects, and microservice adopters. However, existing architecture description languages do not support the strategic DDD patterns sufficiently; modeling tools for DDD primarily focus on its tactical patterns. As a consequence, different opinions on how to apply strategic DDD exist, and it is not clear how to combine its patterns. Aiming for a clear and concise interpretation of the patterns and their combinations, this paper distills a meta-model of selected strategic DDD patterns from the literature. It then introduces Context Mapper, an open source project that a) defines a Domain-specific Language (DSL) expressing the strategic DDD patterns and b) provides editing, validation, and transformation tools for this DSL. As a machine-readable description of DDD, the DSL provides a modeling foundation for (micro-)service design and integration. The models can be refactored and transformed within an envisioned tool chain supporting the continuous specification and evolution of Context Maps. Our validation activities (prototyping, action research, and case studies) suggest that the DDD pattern clarification in our meta-model and the Context Mapper tool indeed can benefit the target audience.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Kapferer S. and Zimmermann O. (2020). Domain-specific Language and Tools for Strategic Domain-driven Design, Context Mapping and Bounded Context Modeling. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD, ISBN 978-989-758-400-8, pages 299-306. DOI: 10.5220/0008910502990306

in Bibtex Style

@conference{modelsward20,
author={Stefan Kapferer and Olaf Zimmermann},
title={Domain-specific Language and Tools for Strategic Domain-driven Design, Context Mapping and Bounded Context Modeling},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD,},
year={2020},
pages={299-306},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0008910502990306},
isbn={978-989-758-400-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD,
TI - Domain-specific Language and Tools for Strategic Domain-driven Design, Context Mapping and Bounded Context Modeling
SN - 978-989-758-400-8
AU - Kapferer S.
AU - Zimmermann O.
PY - 2020
SP - 299
EP - 306
DO - 10.5220/0008910502990306