Introducing EventStorming

Alberto Brandolini • Focus On • Feb 12, 2014

In the past months I’ve spent some time experimenting with this weird thing. It started like a “Ouch I have no time to draw a precise UML diagram, let’s do this instead” then became a thing called Event-Based modelling workshop that I presented at Italian Agile Day 2012, I later had the chance to do more experiments in Belgium and Poland during Vaughn Vernon’s IDDD tour, and I gathered incredibly valuable feedbacks and insights.

I managed to find a cooler name –EventStorming– just before the whole thing exploded in summer 2013. While I realised there was a lot of value in it, other practitioners (Mathias Verraes, Tom Janssen, Marco Heimeshoff, Yves Reynhout, Tomas Jaskula, Alessandro Colla, Andrea Balducci, Jef Claes, just to name a few) started exploring and playing with the format with amazing results, leading me to the conclusion that this is something more than “just another workshop format”.

What is Event Storming

Event Storming is a workshop format for quickly exploring complex business domains.

It is powerful: it has allowed me and many practitioners to come up with a comprehensive model of a complete business flow in hours instead of weeks.
It is engaging: the whole idea is to bring people with the questions and people who know the answer in the same room and to build a model together.
It is efficient: the resulting model is perfectly aligned with a Domain-Driven Design implementation style (particularly fitting an Event Sourcing approach), and allows for a quick determination of Context and Aggregate boundaries.
It is easy: the notation is ultra-simple. No complex UML that might cut off participants from the heart of the discussion.
It is fun: I always had a great time leading the workshops, people are energised and deliver more than they expected. The right questions arise, and the atmosphere is the right one.

Read the full post on Zio Brando’s Blog