Once you have a timeline of events augmented with pain points, look for significant business events indicating a change in context or phase. These are called pivotal events and are marked with a vertical bar dividing the events before and after the piv‐ otal event.

For example, “shopping cart initialized,” “order initialized,” “order shipped,” “order delivered,” and “order returned” represent significant changes in the process of mak‐ ing an order, as shown in Figure 12-5.

Figure 12-5. Pivotal events denoting context changes in the flow of events

Pivotal events are an indicator of potential bounded context boundaries.