EventStorming

EventStorming; Continuous discovery beyond software modelling

Moving towards a microservices architecture

We see a lot of companies are moving towards a microservice architecture. The big pitfall of microservices architecture is to focus on the technology, how big the microservice needs to be, how many lines of codes, what entities do we put in a microservice, and using rest as the communication between them. But to succeed we need to focus on the problem space, by crunching domain knowledge and do domain modelling. EventStorming is a perfect fit for domain modelling, and almost all the microservices leaders seem to agree. Even ThoughtWorks finally put EventStorming on ‘adopt’ in their most recent rendition of their technology radar. But EventStorming has grown to be more than just a tool for domain modelling and to be successful and create autonomous teams you need to use EventStorming for more than only domain modelling.

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By Kenny Baas-Schwegler, ago

EventStorming and how to monitor Domain Events for product management

We design, model, and create software to solve a problem for our customer (this can also be a customer from within the same company). Only when we do so, we focus naturally on solving the happy path and want to deliver that value as soon as possible. The only problem here is that we will always come to a point where we get corner cases or business exceptions, and the question starts to arise, what shall we do? Is it worth the effort to invest in building a solution for this, or can we leave this function out of the system because it is not worth it? To answer this question, we want, if possible, feedback from the system to know this. We can quickly get this feedback making it explicit in the form of a Domain Event during our EventStorming and start monitoring it. This way we can leave the options open until we know what to do.

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By Kenny Baas-Schwegler, ago

EventStorming the perfect wedding

Arranging a wedding is an exciting time to look forward to, but also comes with a lot of stress, especially when planning for it. For most of us, it will be the first time to plan our wedding, and, at least for me, hopefully, also the last. We can, of course, always hire a party planner (sort of like the domain expert on weddings), but getting married is already expensive enough, and for most of us this is not an option. Besides, there is also the family wishes to take in consideration, and might it just be that sometimes our family can also be domain experts. Let’s face it, they already seen there fair share of weddings, and most of them already have experience getting married themselves. We should consider their wishes and especially take advantage of their knowledge. Well, we can, with EventStorming! (and yes, I am the bridezilla of the two).

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By Kenny Baas-Schwegler, ago

Crossing the bounded context, events-first, the REST is not needed

Technical design decision can have a severe impact on companies their communication structure. Conway’s law explains; “Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” Such is the story also with a microservices architecture. A lot of companies decide to use REST to communicate between bounded contexts and or services. What can happens is that the services in the bounded context now get dependent on each other. The dependency on finishing a service their process will resolve in cascading failures if a service is down. Cascading failures will reflect on the way organizations communicate between teams. Teams now rely on each other before finishing their process. Dependency between teams can severely disrupt the company to respond better to the fast-changing demands of customers; companies get more entangled than before. To combat getting cascading failures, we must follow the communication structure of the business. We can do this by using Event Storming and going events-first.

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By Kenny Baas-Schwegler, ago