When organizations move toward microservices, one of the main drivers is the hope for faster time to market. However, this aspiration only tends to be realized when services (and their supporting teams) are cleanly sliced along long-lived business domain boundaries. Otherwise meaningful features will naturally require tight coordination between multiple teams and services, introducing natural friction in competing roadmap prioritization. The solution to this problem is good domain modeling, and event storming has rapidly become one of our favorite methods for rapidly identifying the key concepts in a problem space and aligning a variety of stakeholders in the best way to slice potential solutions.
Event Storming is a useful way to do rapid "outside-in" domain modeling: starting with the events that occur in the domain rather than a static data model. Run as a facilitated workshop, it focuses on discovering key domain events, placing them along a timeline, identifying their triggers and then exploring their relationships. This approach is particularly useful for people taking an Event Sourced approach. Getting the right people in the room is important - a blend of business and technical people who bring both the questions and the answers. Ensuring that you have enough wall space for modeling is the second key to success. Look to discover the big picture, with the goal of collectively understanding the domain in all of its complexity, before diving into solutions.
Event Storming is a useful way to do rapid “outside-in” domain modeling: starting with the events that occur in the domain rather than a static data model. Run as a facilitated workshop, it focuses on discovering key domain events, placing them along a timeline, identifying their triggers and then exploring their relationships. This approach is particularly useful for people taking a CQRS or Event Sourcing approach. Getting the right people in the room is important - a blend of business and technical people who bring both the questions and the answers. Ensuring that you have enough wall space for modeling is the second key to success. Look to discover the big picture, with the goal of collectively understanding the domain in all of its complexity, before diving into solutions.
