EventStorming

EventStorming; Core concepts, glossary and legend

Recently on Twitter Chris Richardson asked if anyone has created a consistent and comprehensive glossary for EventStorming core concepts.

I replied saying that #EventStorming is fuzzy by design. There are standard core concepts, and depending on the context, we use different words for the post-its. Because with that fuzziness, you get more insights. I call it just enough structure to let transactional conversations flow and create a shared mindset and tons of new insight—a shared pool of understanding. However thinking back at past workshops, and from skimming the EventStorming book checking out the core concepts, Chris has a point, we lack an excellent consistent glossary of the core concept, also specific per type. This post describes my take on EventStorming core concepts written down in a consistent and comprehensive glossary. Just be sure to try and avoid jargon as much as possible, as it sets up the unnecessary insider-outsider distinction.

I have moved the content of this blog to the DDD-crew GitHub page, were it will be updated by the community.

https://github.com/ddd-crew/eventstorming-glossary-cheat-sheet
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By Kenny Baas-Schwegler, ago

Making the most out of remote EventStorming

A while back the virtual Domain-driven design meetup experimented with doing a remote EventStorming. The outcome was that doing remote EventStorming as you would do it offline is sub-optimal. The interaction was lacking during the storming parts, and the number of insights gained was lower. That is the power of EventStorming, and it was not present. Still, we asked ourselves how we can make remote EventStorming more optimal, and with most of the world being stuck at home due to corona, I started experimenting with it. In this post, I will describe heuristics about my first experience with remote EventStorming.

EventStorming Workshop Facilitation | Avanscoperta
Copywrite: Avanscoperta
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By Kenny Baas-Schwegler, ago

Extending the Bounded Context Canvas with BDD Examples

Ever since Nick Tune introduced the world to the Bounded Context Canvas, I incorporate it in my workshops and trainings. Nick sees the canvas as a checklist for designing our Bounded Context canvas. For me, it is also perfect as a visualisation tool to make the Bounded Context explicit. The one thing I am missing is examples in the form of acceptance criteria discovered and eventually formalised during our Behaviour Driven Development flow. In this post, I explain how I extended the Bounded Context Canvas with BDD examples from Example Mapping to show how to formalise the behaviour of a Bounded Context.

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By Kenny Baas-Schwegler, ago

EventStorming cheat sheet

EventStorming is the smartest approach to collaborate beyond silo boundaries. The power of EventStorming comes from a diverse multi-disciplined group of people who, together, have a lot of wisdom and knowledge. While it originally was invented for a workshop to model domain-driven design aggregates, it now has a broader spectrum. From gaining a big-picture problem space of the whole domain to gaining insight into the entire software delivery flow and creating a long term planning. Every one of these workshops has the same basic requirements and needs. In this EventStorming cheat sheet post, I will describe these basic requirements in a cheat sheet.

I have moved the content of this blog to the DDD-crew GitHub page, were it will be updated by the community.

https://github.com/ddd-crew/eventstorming-glossary-cheat-sheet
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By Kenny Baas-Schwegler, ago

A quest in finding the perfect EventStorming backpack

Over recent years, a tool called EventStorming became one of the go-to techniques for Domain-Driven Design consultants to collaboratively explore complex business domains at customers. Since consultants travel a lot from company to company helping with their questions about approaching software delivery this poses a small 1st world problem; How can we still comfortably travel while still carrying the required equipment to do an EventStorming at the customer (without breaking our back or needing a personal fitness coach). This was exactly the conversation we, Maxime Sanglan-Charlier and Kenny Baas-Schwegler, had during DDD Europe 2019. In this post, Maxime and Kenny will share their quest in finding the perfect EventStorming backpack.

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By Kenny Baas-Schwegler, ago

Visualise coupling between contexts in Big Picture EventStorming

A Big Picture EventStorming is a type of EventStorming where you get business and IT from an organisation into one room to explore the entire line of that business. This way we can find competing goals, ambiguity in the language, communication boundaries between contexts, and most important we share knowledge! We end up with a visual overview of our business architecture and can map our IT systems on or do for instance a value stream mapping. But we can also map and visualise coupling between contexts in Big Picture EventStorming. In this blog post, I will share my insights on how I visualise contexts boundaries in a Big Picture EventStorming.

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By Kenny Baas-Schwegler, ago

Model Exploration Whirlpool – Domain-Driven Design: The First 15 Years

with EventStorming and Example Mapping

This article was published in the leanpub book: Domain-Driven Design: The First 15 Years

Introduction

People often ask for more concrete guidance on how to explore models, especially in an Agile or Lean setting. The model exploration whirlpool is Eric Evans attempt to capture such advice in writing. It is not a development process, but a process that fits in most development processes. The central theme revolving the process is to keep challenging the model. While the process itself for most is straightforward and easy to understand, there are not many concrete examples to find on how to do such a model exploration whirlpool. Most people when starting to use Domain-driven design (DDD) are looking for these practical examples. In this article, I will tell you my story of how I used the model exploration whirlpool by combining EventStorming, a technique that came from the DDD community, and Example Mapping, a technique from Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) community. 

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By Kenny Baas-Schwegler, ago