Event storming
Event storming is a collaborative domain-discovery workshop technique created by Alberto Brandolini around 2013. Participants — engineers, product, domain experts — write domain events (past-tense business facts: 'Order Submitted', 'Payment Captured') on sticky notes and arrange them on a long wall along a timeline. Aggregates, commands, policies, and bounded contexts emerge from the layout.
The technique exists because requirements-document-style domain analysis hides disagreements. Event storming surfaces them: 'wait, does Order Submitted include the inventory check?' becomes a 30-second conversation between sales and warehouse, not a six-week back-and-forth via JIRA. Variants include big-picture event storming (week-long, whole-business) and design-level event storming (half-day, one bounded context, used to design a service). The output isn't a deliverable in itself — it's the shared understanding plus a model that engineers then encode. Pairs naturally with domain-driven design.
Related terms
- Domain-driven design
Domain-driven design (DDD) is a software-design approach, formalised by Eric Evans in 2003, that places the business domain at the centre of model design.
- Bounded context
A bounded context is the boundary within which a particular domain model — its terms, rules, and invariants — is consistent and authoritative.