Tooling
Most of this discipline needs a wall, some stickies and the right people in the room. Software helps with four specific things, and pretending it helps with more is how a modelling programme becomes a tool selection exercise.
What software is actually for here
Section titled “What software is actually for here”Running the workshop, and keeping the wall afterwards. A physical wall is still the best surface for event storming, and it dies within a week. The Event Stormer is the one tool here that exists, and what it buys is that the session survives as a text file rather than as photographs.
Holding the catalog where people look. A register that is searchable, linkable, and part of the artefacts people already read. This is the lowest-tech requirement and the one that matters most.
Computing the difference between intent and reality. Nobody can hold eleven relationships and eleven integrations in their head and reliably spot the mismatches — and nobody will redo it by hand every month. This is the DDD mapper, and it is the only part of this section that could not be done with a spreadsheet.
Collecting the evidence. Observing the estate continuously rather than during a two-week audit. Necessarily automated, because the value comes from noticing changes within weeks.
What software is not for
Section titled “What software is not for”Drawing the boundaries. No tool has ever found a bounded context. They are found by noticing that two departments mean different things by one word, and that happens in conversation.
Replacing the workshop. A collaborative modelling tool is worth having when people cannot be in a room, and the Event Stormer is one. It is a substitute for a wall, not for the argument.
Making the model true. A beautifully rendered diagram of a wrong model is worse than a sketch of a right one, because it is harder to disbelieve.
The honest position on diagramming tools
Section titled “The honest position on diagramming tools”They are fine. Use whichever one people will actually open.
What matters more than the tool is one rule: the diagram must be generated from the data, not drawn beside it. A hand-drawn context map and a catalog are two sources of truth, and they will disagree within a quarter — silently, because nothing compares them.
That is the specific reason the landscapes page renders its maps
from src/lib/landscapes.ts rather than embedding an image. A new relationship
appears in the tables and the counts on the home page change; nobody has to
remember to update a picture.
In this section
Section titled “In this section”- Event Stormer — the board a domain is discovered on. Deployed, and usable today.
- DDD mapper — the tool this hub is arguing for.
- Modelling and diagramming — what to use for glossaries and pictures.
- Evidence and discovery — how the landscape gets collected, and what each source cannot see.
Status
Section titled “Status”One of them is deployed. The Event Stormer is doc-hub’s board and it is real; the rest have designs, decided interfaces and no software, and the tools page says which is which.
Until the mapper exists, the landscapes page does by hand what it would do continuously — which is a reasonable way to find out whether the automated version would pay for itself.