From Business to Events and back

Alberto Brandolini, the creator of Event Storming, once said: “it’s the developers misunderstanding, not the expert knowledge, that gets released in production”.

Outside the technical team around our businesses the IT department often raises terrible associations. Think about it. You may see long rooms filled with eccentric people communicating using some cipher. As IT, we usually work hard for such a picture. For us what often matters is new shiny technologies and tools supported by the use of a steadily growing number of more and more complex programming patterns.

We make it even worse. We make software complex, because we can or because we want to. Users? Nah. “Business”? Nah, Nah, it’s “they”. Did you hear it? It’s the sound of us digging a deeper hole.

At the same time, just a few days ago, the latest Thoughtworks Technology Radar put Event Storming in an Adopt position, giving it the highest recommendation. What is the basis for such a decision? What is this magical tool that everyone is getting so excited about?

Exploring and describing business processes precisely in and around the product is a very complicated task. At the same time, it requires a light and an agile approach. We need a rapid and fast environment, where we can focus on the right value that we can deliver, and solve the problems way before they emerge. Event Storming is the right tool to do the job. People from different departments and developers working on any business process model it together. Not only the product team but the whole company benefits from the nature of this tool.

In my presentation, I want to share with you what Event Storming is and what it can become, backed by the story of our journey of using Event Storming for different projects, from core domain ones to helping solving business processes bottlenecks using Machine Learning.