On 24-05-2018 I had the opportunity to do a small EventStorming hands-on during the first edition of Ba-Beyond Here is my reaction on the same day twitter://@ylorph
Before I dive into my small retrospective, let's first see what this conference is about.
Well the "BA" stands for Business Analysis, and some might think
"Hey that's not your cup of tea, a conference about formal business analysis."
The "Beyond" is what appealed to me.
All the people I met at this conference are looking for ways to go further than formal or traditional analysis.
They are actively seeking for opportunities to engage with the business and development team, sooner and in a more agile fashion.
They see themselves as enabler of knowledge sharing and not only as knowledge scribe or requirement gatherer, passing the information form business to development.
And that was refreshing.
EventStorming is a lightweight workshop format intended to capture and visualize the domain of a business with all it's complexities and interactions.
It was invented by Alberto Brandolini with the aim of balancing out the biggest bottleneck we have in software development: learning and shared understanding.
The conference foresaw talks of about 20 to 25 minutes, followed by 15 to 20 minutes of Q&A.
At first I wanted to just do a talk on EventStorming, explaining the format.
The organization then quickly asked to transform it into a hands-on.
A hands-on of 40 minutes, and some time to steal on the coffee break.
More of an EventStorming appetizer than a hands-on in reality :-)
40 minutes is not much at all, so there was a choice to be made on what to make apparent about EventStorming
I limited the number of participants to 15.
I got help for a business colleague (Yes a real, genuine Domain Expert)
I prepared some A4 with a summary, big fonts, with a highlight of the Domain.
I made perfectly clear to the attendees that they probably would not be able to run one themselves, but that they at least would get an idea whether
'This is for me' or 'this is not for me (yet)'
The hands-on then, to my utter delight, went as any EventStorming session go:
The facilitator (me) explaining what a Business Event is and pointing out that there is a timeline.
I did put the first sticky myself.
Then the, normal, few minutes phase where participants are clearly asking themselves 'What should I do , Why am I here ?'
And then suddenly, stickies getting on the wall at a higher rate.
That was about 20 minutes into the allotted time...
We stopped I explained what happened, we quickly added some order left and right of some pivotal event.
Then the discussion went on to the type of information that EventStorming allows to get that more formal workshop do not provide:
- knowledge of how the people of the business interact with each other.
- The personality type of the business people
You could event find out if there is a dungeon master
see "The rise and fall of the Dungeon Master" by Alberto Brandolini - Where they fit , as human, in the overall process as well as their knowledge of their own part.
- Last but no least putting faces on a particular problems
So, all in all, in 40 minutes it went way better than I expected.
Alberto's book : Introducing EventStorming
Yes, it's only 60% finished, he's probably still working on it as you read this ...
But this book is more than worth it's price, buy it, now !
EventStormers Google Group
DDD-CQRS-ES Slack
Don't hesitate to ask questions or share experiences on those 2 online communities.