Open Agile Architecture™

The goal of an event storming workshop is to explore a domain with several people collaboratively.

To do so, people will be placing domain events on sticky notes on a wall along a timeline with an unlimited modeling surface.

The workshop puts together three kinds of people: people with questions, people with answers, and a facilitator.

The orange color sticky note is the convention for the event.

The event is named with a past participle because of its simple semantic and notation. For example, order placed, order paid, order executed, product sent, etc.

Events are used because they are easy to grasp and relevant for domain experts.

Event storming workshops focus on domain events structured along a timeline.

The goal of the event storming workshop is to maximize the learning of all the participants. At the end of the workshop, the participants should have gained a shared knowledge of the domain subject of the workshop.

The physical setup is important: the surface of the wall represents an unlimited modeling surface and everyone should stand up to increase engagement in the workshop. There must be a continuous effort of every participant to maximize the engagement. The collaborative approach involves people with questions, people with answers, and a facilitator.

Markers and sticky notes should be available in different colors and in sufficient quantity.

There should be no limitation of the scope under investigation and the model should be continuously refined through low-fidelity incremental notation.

Event storming can have different goals, but mainly these two common ones are distinguished:

The concepts used during an event storming session, apart from the event concept, are voluntarily set by the participants whenever they feel they need one. However, the facilitator can suggest the following “usual” concepts: