Storystorming by Martin Schimak
12-13 October 2020, 9 am – 5 pm
What to expect
This is a hands-on workshop. We will work in teams to analyze an exciting and fairly new domain and design solution proposals. We will explore four different workshop methods, invest a bit time in their original background and discuss goals and different situational use cases for the methods. In order to make the relationships in between the methods and our findings visible and to gain new insights, we will use a simple set of building blocks and colored sticky notes to represent them. We will experience that our methods, which are quite different in their classical form, become more accessible for busy organizations, that findings can be visually linked with each other and that results of one method may serve as a direct starting point for the next method. On our way, we will learn quite a bit about important cross-cutting topics rooted in Domain-Driven Design, such as the Ubiquitous Language and the Bounded Context.
Is this for me?
Are you confronted with analyzing or designing customer journeys, workflows or business processes, with or without a relation to business software development? Are you a domain or business expert in your company required to collaborate with software people? Are you a product owner, a business analyst, a software architect or a lead/senior software developer? Or are you simply looking for lightweight methods to succeed with process or software design workshops? If at least one of these questions applies, this training is definitely for you!
At the age of ten Martin Schimak fell in love with coding. A few years later he left his love and studied business and law. But only to find out: that’s awesome knowledge for designing business software! In the more than 15 years since then he talked to energy traders, telecom people, wind tunnel experts and many others. This collaboration formed a hands-on domain “decoder” with a passion for Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and a soft spot for colored sticky notes! Martin is a trainer with experience in 50+ companies and 10+ countries. He regularly speaks at meetups and conferences across Europe and from time to time in the US.
“I reach out to combine existing, practical methods with which we can create more mental clarity. What does really help us to succeed, what just steals our time? What knowledge do we lack and who has it? When do we use which method and how can we combine methods with each other? What else do we need to make everything work in our own work context? Really useful businesses and their software are based on really useful models!”
Event Storming
In order to make a collaboration between domain experts and software experts successful, particularly flexible workshop formats are needed. The extremely adaptable character of Event Storming enables differentiated interdisciplinary discussions between stakeholders with very different backgrounds and, above all, facilitates cooperation beyond specialization boundaries and “silos”. Deeply rooted in Domain-Driven Design, Event Storming allows us to design clean, maintainable and reactive solutions. Furthermore, we will also use its “color theory” as a starting point to use other tools in a similar style. The increased coherence of our work results will increase visibility, trigger associations and help us gain new insights!
Domain Storytelling
The most natural way to learn a language is certainly to listen to the parents, to imitate them and to speak the language yourself and soon. Little children repeat what they have heard and receive feedback. Gradually, they understand more than words, begin to form sentences and later tell complete stories! In domain storytelling, we listen to domain experts as they talk about their cause and use their language. At the same time we record their sentences with a very simple system. In this way, the domain experts can provide us with quicker feedback: “Oh, but I meant something different!” We form stories out of sentences and after a few stories we already know many of the persons, activities and objects of the domain!
User Story Mapping
User Story Mapping is a pretty simple idea, but with a huge impact on the effectiveness of product backlogs, team meetings, and release planning. Based on a user journey through a product or on the basis of a larger business process, the big picture of many requirements can be clearly presented and understood. This way we can prioritize in a much more meaningful way, because the customer focus is always maintained, the users and the way they use our product are visible and at the center of all our considerations. And that’s way better than exchanging many arguments about “obviously” required features from a very individual point of view (as it supposedly already happened in some software development projects!)
Impact Mapping
It’s pretty “easy” to get bogged down in creative processes or even completely lost. But our products and projects do not exist in a vacuum: we are surrounded by people, other projects, our organization and a larger society. Impact maps guide us through a dynamic process of iterative decision-making, placing different deliverables in the context of their perceived impact on key stakeholders. Impact maps help us to ultimately achieve the expected and hoped-for business results by constantly responding to changes on the move, “grounding” our plans, adapting them to reality, and possibly also stopping totally unrealistic projects at a very early stage!
Domain-Driven Design
On our way through different methods, we’ll run into important topics rooted in Domain-Driven Design, such as the Ubiquitous Language and the Bounded Context. The ubiquitous language is the term Eric Evans, author of “Domain-Driven Design” uses for the practice of building up a common, rigorous language between domain experts, users and developers. It’s very important that we healthily obsess with language and a common understanding of the concepts we express, because this is the basis for what we will end up with, in particular also in software. However, language is not universal, but exists inside “bounded contexts”, a focus of strategic design, which is all about dealing with large models and teams, dividing large problems and solutions into smaller ones and being explicit about their interrelationships.
Impressions
What former attendees said
"In a world of 1000 methods, Martin Schimak has managed to filter out the right ones, and even to improve them." - Angela Rumpl, Teamlead Engineering, kununu.com "Collaborative Modeling is a most effective tool. This training inspired me a lot and created a huge drive for more!" - Andreas Melcher, Senior Software Engineer, iteratec.de "This is for product owners, analysts, architects and developers who want to learn how to model the business collaboratively." - Fabian Schmied, Lead Developer, rubicon.eu "Great workshop to learn and compare different methods. Great presentation, great discussions and great atmosphere." - Angelika Kadnar, .NET-Developer, cssteam.at "We left this workshop energized and equipped with a rich tool set to face the modeling challenges of the real world." - Paul Rohorzka, Software Gardener, techtalk.at
Registration
Date & Venue
12-13 October 2020, 9 am – 5 pm
DC Spaces – TechTalk’s Event Location
Saturn Tower
Leonard-Bernstein-Strasse 10
1220 Vienna
Price
EUR 1300 Early Bird for registrations until 7 September 2020
EUR 1400 Regular
Price excl VAT.
For additional information please contact trainings@techtalk.at