My brief description of Event Storming (ES) is it’s a modelling workshop for visualising processes within a business or a system. It gives perspective from all heights of an organisation. For business operation level Big Picture Event Storming can really identify gaps and areas of frustration. Highlighting where tradeoffs exist thus giving your organisation a place to focus on improving. Taking the scope down to Process modelling and through to Feature modelling gives developers, designers, end users and business stake holders a shared language to speak where complicated technological wizardry is not needed. Just a group of people having conversation, discussing the business objectives and capturing things on Post-Its. Inviting the correct people to have a conversation using this visual technique will emphasise dependencies which were previously hidden. Highlighting these can avoid making the wrong decisions about a products from a technical and business perspective.

Event Storming is a pattern for exploration and discovery. It comes from the world of Domain Driven Design (DDD) and I like to think of it as a stripped down DDD. DDD-Lite but with more business focus and less of the jargon complexity. An ES workshop gathers all people from across the business and leaves technical skill requirement at the door. The only requirement of attendees is their energy, attention and willingness to give it a go. During an ES workshop everyone is armed with orange Post-Its ( Events ) and the knowledge about their part of the company which they bring with them.

Software creation is an exploratory task, and while exploring more learning occurs. Capturing this is critically important. ES is about visualising all that knowledge as an event based mind map and identifying the gaps, unknowns and pain points within. With the right audience for the ES, you can get a harmony between groups who traditionally might never meet and more importantly alignment where previously has been misunderstanding.

For example in an ES workshop you could get the Business Analysts who know the business needs and demands, identifying Commands and Events along side the Developers who will implement the features. Couple this with having the UX Designers and the end users doing some validations of the data and the UI that could support this data and you will get alignment end to end. You will also get early verification of what could work and what won’t before you write a single line of code.

There are a few forms of Event Storming. Big Picture, Service or Process Design and Feature Design. This recipe will cover Process and Feature level design.

For a more comprehensive background to Event Storming, checkout the Open Practice Library where you will find more links, articles and examples of ES being used in the field with our customers.