Domain-Driven Architecture Modeling and Rapid Prototyping with Context Mapper

Strategic Domain-driven Design (DDD) has become an established practice for system decomposition and service identification in recent years. The trend towards microservices increased the popularity of DDD patterns such as Subdomain, Bounded Context, Aggregate and Context Map. In our previous work, we presented a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) providing a clear and concise interpretation of the DDD patterns and their combinations. As a machine-readable description of DDD, the DSL establishes a foundation for systematic service decomposition and DDD-based architecture descriptions that can be refactored and refined by model transformations. The DSL and supporting tools are implemented in the open source project Context Mapper. In this extended version of our previous paper we enhance the DSL grammar to allow domain-driven designers to prototype applications rapidly: they can specify user stories and/or use cases in the DSL, and model transformations can then derive Subdomains and Bounded Contexts automatically. The Context Mapper tool chain supports the continuous, iterative specification and evolution of Context Maps and other service design artifacts. Our validation activities included prototyping, action research, and case studies. This paper illustrates such a transformation chain on the basis of one of our case studies.