DDD Europe 2026 - Program

Context Mapping - hands on

DDD Europe - Hands-on Lab

Speakers

Paul Rayner

Paul Rayner
Description

(This is a hands-on lab with limited capacity)

In strategic design we seek to understand the deeper structure of our hidden sociotechnical landscape, especially the interaction of software systems and development teams.

Context mapping is a significant technique for discovering and communicating that understanding. It can be a key technique for enabling legacy application modernization, identifying and communicating team boundaries and responsibilities, and setting your teams up for success in their projects as you integrate with other contexts both internal and external to your organization.

In this hands-on lab, you learn key techniques for context mapping to drive success in your strategic design efforts. We'll show how context mapping connects to other techniques such as Big Picture EventStorming and enables both brownfield and greenfield application development.

n.b. We'll be using the ContextFlow OSS application (https://contextflow.virtualgenius.com) to map collaboratively and describe contexts, looking for emergent patterns, challenges, and strategies in our mapping.

Prerequisites

Laptops

About Paul Rayner

Paul Rayner is a developer, instructor, coach and popular conference speaker. He co-founded DDD Denver and is founder and chairman of the Explore DDD Conference (exploreddd.com). His company Virtual Genius LLC, provides training and coaching in DDD and EventStorming for agile teams (virtualgenius.com). Paul is from Perth, Australia, but chooses to live, work and play with his wife and two children, in Denver, Colorado. He blogs at thepaulrayner.com and tweets with an Australian accent at @ThePaulRayner.