Focused map views (C4 style)

[sebastianhaeni]

Use case

For larger organizations, the map usually contains a lot of bounded contexts and the map becomes hard to understand.

Proposed solution

Focused views or filters or multiple maps would address this issue. This is in a way similar how you can jump around in C4 diagrams.

[paulrayner]

Same context on 2 different context maps. One option is sharing the context - instead of creating a new context, you select it and add it to the new map. Another option, one map, but you can filter stuff out. eg. by team, or whatever is adjacent to this team. This would help it scale to 50+ contexts, and ~13-14 small teams @sebastianhaeni

[paulrayner]

@sebastianhaeni the 0.12.0 release (shipping now) takes a first run at this from the filtering / focused-view angle:

• Focus lens (added in 0.11.0): click a team's crosshair, or right-click a single context, to light up just that neighborhood and dim everything else, with a focus bar naming the subject and a running "N of M shown" count. You can widen the lens outward by adjacency hops and hop between teams without leaving the canvas. It is non-destructive: it changes what is visible, not the map. This is the closest thing to the C4 "jump around" feel so far.
• Teams & Repos filtering (0.12.0): the left panel now filters teams by topology type and repos by assignment status alongside name search, so you can narrow what you are looking at.

On the multiple maps idea (the same context on more than one map, or splitting a large system across maps): we are still thinking that through and have not built it. Our ACME sample sits at 19 bounded contexts and reads fine as-is, so the immediate pressure is lower than we expected. Pushing comfortably past ~20 contexts per map is where multiple-maps / shared-context support earns its place, and that needs more design before we commit. Keeping this issue open to track that part.

I would genuinely value your thinking on the larger end: how would you want to handle a system with 50+ bounded contexts? My working assumption is that we would not want to render that many on one map at once, since it would likely be unreadable no matter how good the filtering is, and that the answer is some form of decomposition (multiple maps, C4-style drill-down levels, or per-team / sub-domain views) rather than one giant canvas. Does that match your mental model, or would you expect to keep everything on a single map and lean entirely on focus / filter to navigate it?

And in the meantime, would love to hear whether the focus lens covers enough of your immediate use case.

[sebastianhaeni]

Focus lens and team/repo filtering already look very useful.

I would genuinely value your thinking on the larger end: how would you want to handle a system with 50+ bounded contexts?

On the larger-scale question I think the multiple-maps design is probably what would make this work well.

Here's how I imagine it:

The current map in the tool is centered around one team's view of the world: “our team” versus “internal”. At larger scale, I would not expect one team-owned map to capture the whole organization cleanly. Instead, I would expect other teams to have their own maps, built and owned from their perspective.

That would let each team model the contexts and relationships that matter most to them, without forcing everything into one giant canvas. Shared contexts could still appear across maps, but ideally they would refer back to the same underlying bounded context rather than becoming duplicated.

-> One underlying model of contexts and relationships, with multiple team-owned maps as different views into that model.

I understand that this would be a bigger change :)