Systems Thinking by combining Team Topologies with Context Maps

Michael Plöd presents how he combines ideas from Domain Driven Design Context Maps with Team Topologies. As described in Accelerate, one key predictor for continuous delivery performance and the ability to scale an organization comes from a loosely coupled architecture. DDD comes with Bounded Contexts, boundaries around a model expressed in a consistent and unambiguous language tailored around a specific purpose. Separating a system into multiple Bounded Contexts leads to the creation of multiple parts. As Russell Ackoff noted, “To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately.” Michael’s idea is to study how Bounded Context and teams interact to better manage the system. For this, he proposes to use Team Topologies and team interactions and supplement them with Context Map patterns. Combining the two allows us to see various interesting things, such as checking if teams that are supposed to be independent of one another are not dealing with Bounded Contexts that require heavy collaboration or if a team is not supporting too many BCs, which means they could have a high cognitive load, or how we could split the system managed by a Complicated Subsystem Team.