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Summary – Partial business knowledge and traditional scoping workshops often produce misaligned digital products, scope creep, and hidden cost overruns. Event Storming maps real events, uncovers friction points and divergent terminology, and defines aggregates, policies, and bounded contexts—all while involving every stakeholder. This visual approach aligns business and IT, secures governance, and clarifies architectural decisions. Solution : host a guided Event Storming workshop to establish a shared, adaptable scope.
In many software projects, the pitfall isn’t the choice of technology or code quality but a partial understanding of the business domain to be digitized. All too often, traditional workshops generate ideas without ever creating an operational, shared vision of how the organization actually works. It’s in this upstream scoping phase that Event Storming reveals its full strategic power.
This collaborative method, devised by Alberto Brandolini, focuses on analyzing past events to map business processes, identify areas of uncertainty, and jointly lay the foundations for a coherent, evolvable architecture. By placing the business domain at the center, Event Storming turns each workshop into a driver of lasting alignment between decision-makers, business experts, and IT teams.
Why Event Storming Is Essential to Prevent Project Drift
Event Storming confronts technical assumptions with the reality of business operations to uncover inconsistencies from day one. Its event-driven approach fosters a common understanding of processes and drastically reduces the risk of later misunderstandings.
A Swiss cantonal bank recently ran an Event Storming workshop to digitize its online application journey. This exercise exposed several regulatory exceptions and implicit management decisions, showing that a standard kickoff meeting would never have revealed these dependencies. That insight immediately allowed them to adjust the project scope and avoid months of misguided development by defining an IT requirements specification document.
Identify Key Business Events
The first step is to list every past event that marks the process you’re modeling. Each event should be phrased in the past tense—such as “Order Confirmed” or “Invoice Generated”—to focus on what was actually observed rather than assumed needs.
In a stock management project, identifying the “Goods Receipt Recorded” event immediately integrated quality-control procedures into the digitized workflow.
By naming events precisely, teams often discover different terminologies across departments, revealing misunderstandings that, if unaddressed, would lead to software misaligned with real business practices.
Step-by-Step Guide to Running an Event Storming Workshop
The workshop is structured in clear phases: preparation, event exploration, aggregate modeling, and policy formulation. Each phase produces immediate visual deliverables, ensuring transparent tracking and continuous alignment.
Preparation and Initial Scoping
Before the workshop, define objectives, the functional scope, and the expected level of detail. This includes creating an initial list of business events identified by the experts.
The facilitator’s role is crucial: clarifying the work’s scope, selecting a suitable space, and preparing visual supports (walls fitted with flipcharts, colored sticky notes). Precise scoping prevents drift and ensures efficient use of time together.
In the SME example, this alignment phase immediately ruled out non-priority topics—like detailed archiving of old production orders—that would have needlessly weighed down the process.
Collecting and Structuring Events
Participants gradually place sticky notes representing identified events along a timeline. Each new event is collectively challenged to verify its relevance and wording.
This exploration often uncovers omissions or terminology errors. It also allows grouping or splitting events for greater clarity.
When the SME documented its procurement process, adding the “Supplier Compliance Check” event late in the game completely reshaped the validation sequence, demonstrating the importance of including all concerned parties.
Defining Aggregates and Policies
Once the events are validated, the workshop moves on to identifying aggregates: the entities responsible for maintaining business-data consistency (for example, “Order,” “Customer,” or “Product”).
At the same time, policies or business rules (events triggering an action, rerouting conditions) are mapped using arrows or specifically colored sticky notes.
This work transforms the timeline into an initial Domain-Driven Design (DDD) skeleton that will underpin future architectural decisions.
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Delimiting Bounded Contexts for a Coherent Architecture
Event Storming naturally delineates functional contexts, avoiding purely technical partitions. These boundaries, defined by business criteria, guide the choice between a modular monolith and event-driven microservices.
Understanding Business Boundaries
Each bounded context corresponds to a set of coherent tasks within a single expertise domain. The workshop aligns events with associated responsibilities to draw these territories.
This step challenges participants on the data flows crossing boundaries and any redundancies. The goal is to isolate domains that can evolve independently.
This clear separation between “Order Preparation” and “Delivery Tracking” enabled shorter deployment cycles for each module.
Drawing Contextual Boundaries
Using distinct colors or graphic outlines, you visualize functional zones on the Event Storming map. This view becomes the foundation of your architectural documentation.
These boundaries aren’t set in stone: they evolve with the project during design reviews. But they provide an initial guide for distributing technical responsibilities.
Guiding Architectural Choices
With bounded contexts defined, you can assess the suitability of a modular monolith, microservices segmentation, or a global event-driven approach.
You base decisions on business criteria—event volume, lifecycle independence, scalability requirements—to choose the most appropriate model.
In our example, the high autonomy of modules justified a microservices architecture, delivering better operational resilience and scalability for seasonal activity peaks.
The Human and Organizational Benefits of Event Storming
Event Storming strengthens cohesion between business and IT by making processes and decisions visible. It fosters a culture of continuous collaboration, where every trade-off is documented and shared.
Team Alignment and Engagement
Active participation from every role—from sponsor to developer—fosters ownership and reduces resistance to change. Everyone sees themselves in the model and commits more readily to implementation.
This collective process cuts down on back-and-forth and later misunderstandings, since assumptions are explicitly discussed and validated up front.
Decision Clarity and Risk Reduction
With each event and policy recorded visually, prioritization or arbitration decisions are documented and retrievable later. This secures project governance and minimizes drift risks.
Tracking invalidated assumptions prevents falling into the same traps during future system evolutions.
Strengthening Cross-Functional Collaboration
Event Storming creates a common language free of technical jargon, so every stakeholder can contribute and understand the system map. This practice nourishes cross-functionality and can be replicated in future development phases.
The method also facilitates onboarding new team members, who quickly gain a holistic view of the project without enduring exhaustive, tedious documentation.
Clarify Your Digital Project with Event Storming
Event Storming is a lever for collective clarity, refocusing scoping on the business domain. By identifying real events, defining contexts, and involving all stakeholders, this approach significantly reduces the risk of misunderstandings and misdirected development.
The benefits go beyond technology: human alignment, decision clarity, and organizational agility are powerful assets to ensure the success and longevity of the solution delivered.
Whether your project involves custom business software, an application overhaul, or a distributed platform, our experts are ready to orchestrate an Event Storming workshop tailored to your context and lay the foundations for a successful digital transformation.
