Domain Storytelling — Understanding Your Users by Drawing Pictures

Misunderstandings between developers and the business are a plague. Bad communication makes projects fail. This talk presents a remedy (including a practical demonstration with auditorium participation).

Domain Storytelling is a technique to transform domain knowledge into effective business software. It brings together domain experts and development teams to: (a) understand the domain of a software system, (b) find microservices boundaries, and (c) talk about requirements.

We let domain experts tell us stories about their tasks. While listening, we record the stories using an easy-to-understand pictographic language.

The domain experts can see immediately whether we understand their story correctly. After very few stories, we are able to talk about the people, processes, and events in that domain.

The session is aimed at everyone involved or interested in software development, including non-technical people.

Henning Schwentner

@hschwentner@social.wps.de

Henning loves programming in high quality. He lives this passion as coder, coach, and consultant at WPS – Workplace Solutions. There he helps teams to structure their monoliths or to build new systems from the beginning with a sustainable architecture. Microservices or self-contained systems are often the result. Henning is author of “Domain Storytelling” (Addison-Wesley, 2022), and the www.LeasingNinja.io as well as translator of “Domain-Driven Design kompakt” (dpunkt, 2017).