Event storming drives greater understanding and productivity by simplifying the approach and including multiple levels of stakeholders in the business. With the help of sticky notes and a willing group, you can reveal your business processes more efficiently and enjoyably.
In this blog, we will explain how event storming accelerates your business proccesses.
What is Event Storming?
Event storming is a rapid group modeling approach to domain-driven design. It was originally created by Alberto Brandolini in 2012 as a quick alternative to precise UML diagramming. Event storming is a workshop-style technique that brings project stakeholders together (both developers and non-technical users) to explore complex business domains.
With the help of workshop-style technique, sticky notes and one willing group, you can reveal your business processes more efficiently and enjoyably.
Advantages of event storming
Event storming is designed to be both efficient and fun. By bringing key practitioners into the same room, event storming has the advantage of being:
Fast
The event storming approach reduces the time it takes to create a comprehensive business domain model. What used to take weeks can be accomplished in hours during a single workshop.
Straightforward
Rather than using complex UML, event storming breaks the process down into simple terms that both technical and non-technical stakeholders can understand.
Engaging
One of the goals of event storming is to make modeling fun. It is a hands-on approach to domain modeling that invites each person to participate and interact. Besides being more enjoyable, event storming also results in more valuable insights as participants more readily engage in the process and offer their suggestions and expertise.
Effective
Event storming is not data modeling. Instead, it results in a fully behavioral model that can be quickly implemented and validated. For the best outcomes, teams should combine event storming with implementation oriented toward domain-driven design.
Steps of event storming
In a nutshell, it works like this:
- Gather people engaged directly in the process and domain experts in one room. In order to make this workshops effective, you will need at least six to eight people. Invite people who ask the right questions and those who will be able to answer them.
- Put colorful sticky notes on the wall and place “events” from the process on the orange ones and “hot spots”, predicted or presented issues, on red cards.
- Go through the sticky notes and organize them on a timeline. Brainstorm, think, speak out and concentrate on the flow and issues you notice.
- Be sure that no one in the room is left with gaps in mind, uncertainties or questions. All participants must understand everything placed on the wall.
- Identify actors in the process. It might be a person, an external system, an internal process —everything. Don’t limit yourself.
- Concentrate on particular issues and try to go deeper. Try to find improvements or solutions to every event.
- Identify where tangible (like money, users, customers) or intangible (relationship with customer, good user experience) assets exist in the whole system. Don’t focus on profits, remember that losing assets is also important( if not more important)!
- Chose the improvements of the highest importance by ballot.
- Create a chart with your business expert and try to anticipate which opportunities are crucial and at the same time identify the level of complexity.
What you get after doing event storming?
Level of knowledge – Event storming
By talking about business and technical requirements, participants obtain equally vast knowledge. Each person is focused on the same issues, questions and answers. It’s the easiest way to propagate knowledge when a project starts, when the team needs to be changed or even when a new version of the whole product needs to be addressed. Every participant of the workshops has more or less the same knowledge on the product and current situation. People, very often from distant worlds, communicate and understand different perspectives.
Realizing black holes in ideas.
Event storming is very helpful for a dev team. But one of the most important benefits of it is realizing how business processes are defined and considered. In our everyday work we very often realize that some functionalities were well-thought from a technical perspective, but not so much in the business context.
For example, for a business analyst, payments only take place when company receives money from a client and they thought only about this small aspect of reality. They don’t realize that an application needs to respond when the payment is be late or when the payment service breaks down. For that kind of situations event storming is the best technique of asking a business team before the whole design or implementation how the process should look like when it’s all rosy, but also in any edge case.
Creativity – Event storming
There will be a lot of solutions and ideas popping out on how the whole process may work better created in hours instead of weeks.
I see benefits on so many grounds:
- As a developer, you will find out how to hold analytical sessions in order to squeeze the most information from them. Moreover, you will know how not so scare the client with developers’ strange tools or visuals.
- As a manager, you will find out how to involve a developer in the business angle of the product and make them think about it as their very best project.
- As a client, you will find out how to apply the logical thinking of developers to something more than just implementing solutions and writing code.
Want to work with web and mobile app development company?
A web and mobile development company is the best option if you’re planning a mid-sized or large project but don’t have your own team. To clarify, the biggest advantage of a software development company is that they can take ownership of the whole project.
If you’re considering web development services, you can explore more about us – AHT Tech. Above all, we are proud to be one of the most well-established outsourcing companies all around the world. In addition, with over 14 years of experience, we can provide the best software development services for your business.
So, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.
