Finding System Boundaries with Domain Storytelling - Stefan Hofer - NDC London 2021

You want to modularize your monolith or find the right boundaries for microservices? Or you practice domain-driven design (DDD) and are trying to identify bounded contexts? Finding good boundaries is hard; and bad boundaries will tangle your software into a big mall of mud. Modeling and heuristics help to address this difficult issue. In this talk I will introduce Domain Storytelling, a modelling technique for exploring the domain and for finding boundaries. Domain Storytelling means that we bring together domain experts and developers. We let them tell us stories about their domain. While listening, we record the stories using a pictographic language. The experts can see immediately if we understand their story. After very few stories, we are able to see how people work together within and across contexts. This will be illustrated with examples from real-word projects.