Yves Lorphelin is renowned in the Domain-Driven Design community for his expertise in modelling complex systems. At SPA: Software in Practice 2018, Yves will be running a hands-on session teaching us how to model complex systems using a popular approach known as EventStorming.

Over the past few years, EventStorming has become a global phenomena. Developers finally have a technique that immerses them into the business domains they are modelling in software. The benefits of EventStorming are huge, so we interviewed Yves ahead of SPA to get an idea of what we can expect in his session.

Q: Hi Yves. We’re so excited to have you as part of our line-up. Can you tell us why we should be excited about EventStorming?

Thank you,

Well EventStorming allows us to get a lot of information about the business & the people in it in a relatively short time.

Other types of information gathering are like “capture information”, “make report”, “present report“ , “validate report” repeated over a few iteration and it sometimes take days or week for the business to get feedback on what we IT folks understand.

EventStorming is about capturing this information way faster and making sure that everybody involved, business people and IT folks, understand, or at least heard, the exact same information, at the same time.

For me, especially, it allows to put faces onto the problems we’re trying to solve with the systems we’re building: throughout a project, I know who I have to go to to know if we’re making progress

Q: How can EventStorming be so powerful, yet so simple? What’s the secret?

I believe it is powerful because of its perceived simplicity in execution, especially in the Big Picture Format - that’s what we’ll do during the conference, where we want to capture information on the business as it is.

There are just a few ground rules (unlimited space, thinking in events, incremental notation) that we need to keep in mind as facilitators, allowing us to keep focused on helping out the participants to put as much information as possible on the wall.

The simplicity of using events & stickies helps participants to focus on one thing only; describe their domain in term of events on a timeline. Some do have difficulties with that in the beginning, because they were always asked to describe what they want or should do instead of what actually happens, but they generally overcome it quite rapidly.

The fact that we are allowed to make mistakes and that they can be corrected easily is also quite liberating for anyone in the session: the feedback cycle between what someone is describing and the understanding of others happens in a matter of minutes, not days or week like I described previously.

And as Alberto Brandolini says (I’m paraphrasing) “it’s like a pizza, I provided the basic ingredients, you can put any toping on it”.

Q: Attendees of your session will be modelling the domain of HR in government. Do they need any background knowledge?

No, I’ll provide the necessary information and one of my goal for this hands-on is to show how fast we can get knowledge about an unknown domain.

Now, more accurately the domain is the selection & recruitment processes. And we’ve all experienced something similar when applying for a job where multiple round of tests or interviews are planned. The major differences are more regulation and that we are required to give feedback, no “you’ll hear from us” without actually getting feedback.

Q: Who would get the most benefit from EventStorming? Developers, coaches, managers, domain experts, designers?

They all can benefits from it, for various reasons and to varying degrees. It might be worth exploring ways to measure that.

At the very least, the shared understanding that results from an EventStorming session is invaluable and knowing how our work fits in the bigger picture.

Developers get to know the business more intimately. Coaches can use it to do retrospective; we do that on our team. Managers might discover what effectively happens on the floor. Domain Expert, they do exist? (laughing). Designer can find out where the type of issues users are facing.

Q: After attending your session, will attendees have the skills to facilitate EventStorming workshops at their companies?

I hope so. At least in places where they can safely try out, maybe with their own team at first.

That’s how I learned: participating in a meetup or two and impromptu session at conferences, trying at work, with mixed results, trying again.

A few year ago I also followed a full day workshop with Alberto Brandolini and it helped a lot by explaining the basic rules and the dynamics of a session. The dynamics of a session is what I missed most and misunderstood at first.

So my goal is to provide this safe place to try out the format and point out the dynamics. I believe it should be enough to try out.

Q: Is it true that EventStorming works best with a nice supply of sweet foods and coffee?

Well, given my consumption of coffee, we’re talking about an endless supply of coffee.

And of course, food & drinks are needed: it can be quite exhausting

I’d just add some healthy one the list.

Thank you for your time, Yves. We look forward to seeing you at SPA in July. We’re sure your session is going to be brilliant.

Tickets for SPA conference are now available. We’d love you to join us and we’re sure you’d love the company of SPA’s diverse community.