Chapter 11. Managing large projects with bounded contexts

This is the final chapter in our four-chapter series about managing specification suites. Chapters 8, 9, and 10 talked about managing small- to medium-sized suites. In this chapter, we’ll split a large specification suite into several smaller suites, each of which will be a unified model of a particular subarea of a complex business domain. In doing this, you’ll see how the challenge of managing large specification suites can be viewed as a task of managing multiple medium-sized suites, which is something you already know how to do.

One of the biggest projects I’ve worked on while using SBE and Gherkin spread into multiple applications, each having its own specification suite. The applications dealt with the same business domain, but they were managed by separate teams, some of which were outsourced. As systems grow too complex to know completely at the level of individual capabilities, you need techniques for manipulating and comprehending large domains easily, as well as sharing consistent organization models among multiple technical teams.

11.1. Analyzing domain concepts in context

11.2. Modeling specification suites as bounded contexts

11.3. Fitting DDD into an SBE process

11.4. Summary