Context mapping assistant
Status: described, not built.
The problem
Section titled “The problem”Two failures with context maps, and both are tedious rather than difficult.
Aspiration. Every arrow gets labelled customer/supplier, because conformist feels like an admission. A map of aspirational patterns tells you nothing.
Staleness. A relationship labelled open host service four years ago, when there were two consumers and one endpoint. There are now six consumers and four bespoke endpoints, and the label has not moved.
Both are caught by comparing the declared pattern against what crosses. That comparison is mechanical.
What it would read
Section titled “What it would read”- Declared relationships from the catalog
- Observed integrations from the landscape collector
- Schemas and payload shapes (api-hub)
- Repository ownership and commit history, for who can change what
What it would emit
Section titled “What it would emit”A proposed pattern for each context pair, with the evidence:
- Many consumers of one stable interface → open host service
- One consumer, bespoke shape, upstream changes on request → customer/supplier
- Downstream adapts to an interface it never influences → conformist
- Both sides write the same model → shared kernel
- Traffic in both directions, changes landing together → partnership
- Vendor vocabulary stopping at an adapter → anticorruption layer, working
- Vendor vocabulary past the adapter → anticorruption layer, breached
Challenges to declared patterns, which is the valuable half:
Declared customer/supplier. The upstream repository has had no commit referencing a downstream request in 18 months, and the downstream adapter has grown three times. This looks like conformist.
Declared open host service. Four of six consumers use endpoints no other consumer calls. This is six bespoke integrations with one deployment.
Declared shared kernel. The two sides reconcile nightly with an 87% match rate. A reconciliation is not a kernel.
That last one is the Party finding in the seed landscape, detectable entirely from the mechanism.
What it must not do
Section titled “What it must not do”Change a declared pattern. A pattern is an agreement between two owners. The assistant proposes and challenges; the owners decide, and the record of the decision is the value.
Confuse “is” with “should be”. Observed behaviour tells you the pattern in force, not the one that ought to be. A conformist relationship into a core context is correctly detected as conformist and is still a finding — the right response may be to build an anticorruption layer rather than to relabel the arrow.
Propose relationships for unmapped integrations. An unmapped integration is a modelling question: either the map is incomplete or the boundary is wrong. Adding an arrow answers it by assuming the comfortable case, which is how a map gets talked into agreeing with whatever was built.