Event storming is a workshop method for exploring a business domain together. A group puts sticky notes on a wall (things that happened, the commands that caused them, the people and systems involved) until the story of the domain is visible end to end. Alberto Brandolini's notation gives each colour a fixed meaning, so a wall of paper reads the same to everyone who knows the method.
Starting a document from the Event storming template gives you a board built for that, rather than a blank canvas you have to shape yourself. It starts with a single orange domain event, Board Created, the first thing that happened, and nothing else on the wall.
What Makes It a Board, Not Just a Diagram
The board knows what it is, and the editor adapts around it:
- The notation is the palette. The Event Storming category opens first and fills the panel, so the eight note kinds are one click away instead of buried behind a dropdown.
- Notes behave like paper. Each kind has a fixed size and a slight tilt, and the text scales to fit rather than the note growing to fit the text. You cannot resize a note, the same way you cannot resize a sticky you have already peeled off the pad.
- Notes are written in marker, in capitals. Type however you like: the board paints it in a marker face, in caps, the way a pen on paper does. It stays readable from across the room and the wall reads as one hand rather than eight. Your typed wording is what is saved, so a note you export or search for keeps the capitals you actually used.
- Dropping a note starts typing. Drag one out and the cursor is already in it: the drag said where and what, so all that is left is the words.
- Right-click offers verbs, not styling. Cut, Copy, Duplicate, Bring to Front, Send to Back, Change Kind and Remove. A note's colour, shape and text treatment are the notation, so controls that could only break the grammar are not offered. Change Kind is the one exception, because on this board a note's kind is what it means: pick another and the note is repainted in place.
- One mode. An event storming board always works in Diagram mode and has no mode switch; its tools are its own.
Adding a Step in the Middle
The left-to-right order of the wall is the story: this happened, then that. So when a step turns out to be missing, you should not have to shuffle everything after it by hand.
Start dragging a note, hold it over the gap between two notes, and press Alt (Option on a Mac). The board makes room: everything from that gap onwards slides right to open a slot, and the note you are dragging sits in it. Drop, and the note lands exactly there.
It works two ways round, which is the point:
- A new note from the palette: it lands in the slot, ready to type into.
- A note already on the wall: drag it to where it should have been all along. This is the one you will reach for most.
Press Alt after you have started dragging, not before. Some desktops treat Alt-and-click as "move the window", so a drag that begins with Alt already down never reaches the page.
- Nothing happens unless you press Alt. An ordinary drag is an ordinary drag: drop a note next to a row and nothing else on the board stirs. Let go of Alt mid-drag and the board closes up again, there and then.
- Nothing moves until you drop. The opening slot is a preview. Nobody else sees it and nothing is saved until you let go.
- One undo puts it all back. The note and everything that moved aside are a single step in the history, including where a moved note started out.
- The whole board makes room, not just the row. A command sitting above its event, or a policy below it, moves with the event it belongs to, so the columns stay lined up.
- A moved note leaves its gap behind. The wall opens up where the note is going; where it came from is left as it is, for you to tidy or fill as you like.
- A note you have locked stays put and the board opens around it. Arrows between notes stay attached: one that spans the new note simply stretches.
This only happens on an event storming board, where left-to-right means time, and only for notes: a shape or an icon is dropped where you drop it. On an ordinary diagram, a note dropped in a gap is just a note dropped in a gap.
Timeline Lanes
An event-storming board has a rhythm built in: every note of the notation sits in one of its evenly spaced rows, called lanes, and lines itself up with the notes already on the board. There is nothing to switch on.
- A note always lands on a lane. Let go of a note anywhere, even half-way between two rows, and it settles into the nearest one. The same goes for a note you paste, duplicate, add from a photo or import from a file. A plain sticky (not one of the eight note kinds) is only nudged into a lane when you drop it close to one.
- Hold Cmd / Ctrl while dragging to put a note exactly where you want it, lane or no lane. It stays there: nothing moves it back later.
- The arrow keys move a note a whole lane up or down; left and right still nudge it a pixel at a time (ten with Shift).
- Nothing on the board moves to make room while you drag. Only the note you are placing moves; to open a gap, press Alt while dragging (above). (A next-note tab is the one exception: it opens a gap when its spot is taken.)
- You see them only while you are dragging: the lane a note is about to land in lights up, with its neighbours fainter either side, and everything disappears again when you let go.
- In the same row, the board offers you the rhythm. The next place along is one gap from your neighbour, and the one after that leaves a sticky's worth of wall empty in between, room for the event nobody has written yet. Nothing touching, nothing half-way.
- In the row above or below, edges line up. Squarely above or below a note, or one place along from it either way (the diagonal). Same size of sticky also gets the brick position, centred under the gap between two squares; different sizes line up on the left edge or the right edge. That is all of it.
- Push a note right up against another and it takes the next place in the row rather than landing half on top of it: a row stays regular however impatiently you build it.
- The offer is outlined on the lane before you let go, so you always drop into a place you have already seen.
- One gap, always the same. Stickies sit a finger's width apart. Drop a note somewhere with nothing near it and it stays exactly where you put it along its lane.
- Pasting lands where your pointer is. With the pointer over the board, Cmd / Ctrl + V puts the note there, on the nearest lane, taking the next free place if that spot is taken. With the pointer anywhere else (or from a menu), the copy lands just to the right of the original, on the same lane, ready to drag. Several notes keep their layout, each row on a lane of its own.
- Duplicate (Cmd / Ctrl + D) puts the copy just to the right of the original, on the same lane.
- Boards made before lanes held every note are tidied once, the first time someone who can edit opens them: notes sitting between two lanes move to the nearest one, and a message says how many. One Undo puts them back, and the board will not ask again.
- Drag several notes together and the note you grabbed takes the place, just as it would alone; the others follow and keep the spacing they already had.
- Hold Cmd / Ctrl while dragging to ignore the lanes for that one note.
Lanes are never exported: they are there to help you place a note, not to be part of the picture.
Adding the Next Note
The notation reads left to right, and some notes have an obvious neighbour:
- a command comes before the domain event it triggers,
- a policy comes after the domain event it reacts to,
- a command comes after the policy that issues it.
Select a note and a small tab in the next note's colour peeks from each side that has one. Point at a tab to see a dashed outline of the note it will add, exactly where it will land. Click it and the note is added right beside, one gap away, open for typing. If something is already there, the board makes room. The new note is an ordinary note: move it, delete it or change its kind like any other.
Adding Notes From a Photo of the Wall
Most sessions happen on a real wall first. Add from Photo at the top of the Event Storming palette reads that wall in:
- Take or drop a photo of the wall (you can also paste one onto the board).
- The photo fills the screen and a box appears on every sticky found in it, with the words read from its handwriting. The box's colour is the kind, taken from the paper. Show Me, at the photo's top left, walks you through checking it, on your own photo.
- Check it right there: untick a box that is not a note, click the words to fix a misreading, and drag round a sticky it missed. A box that is slightly off can be fixed rather than redrawn: click it to select it, then drag it to move it, drag a corner to resize it, pick a colour to change its kind, or press Delete to remove it. A big wall of small notes is far easier up close: scroll to zoom (or pinch, on a trackpad or a phone, or use the + button), and drag with the middle mouse button to move around (or hold Space and drag). Fit shows the whole photo again.
- Add 5 notes (the button counts them) puts the notes on the board, as a draft: outlined, laid out where they were on the wall, with the rest of the board faded behind them: the second look, at the notes in place and at the size they will really be.
- Fix anything from right there: double-click to correct a word it misread, drag one that landed awkwardly, delete what you do not want, or right-click a note and Change Kind if the light made a colour ambiguous.
- Add 5 notes on the draft bar keeps them, in one step that a single Undo takes back. Discard leaves the board exactly as it was.
The notes land on the lanes the way the wall had them: each row of the photo on a lane of its own, in the same order, even when the photo squeezes two rows closer than one lane. Notes roughly above one another line up in one column, and notes lapped over each other in a row are spread along their lane.
A note your board already has is marked with a tick (its tooltip reads Already here) and left alone: never moved, never re-worded, even if the photo reads it differently. That is what makes the next photo of the next piece of wall safe to import: only what is new is added.
The photo never leaves your machine. Your browser finds the stickies in it, so the room, the whiteboard behind, and whoever is standing in front of it stay with you. Where the server has a reading model, only small crops of individual notes are sent to be read. Where it has none (or its quota is spent), the handwriting is read in your browser too, and the first import downloads that reading model, about 180 MB. The note-finding model is small, under half a megabyte.
It will not get a whole wall in one go. Handwriting in pen, a note half-covered by another, a colour your team uses differently, the far side of a corner: expect to fix some and add a few yourself. It is a head start on the typing, not a replacement for reading your own wall.
One Wall of Paper
The board is a single layer. Every note lands on it, whichever colour it is, so any two notes can be stacked in front of or behind each other and nothing is filed away on a plane you cannot see.
One thing is always true of the stack: actors sit in front of every other note, and hotspots in front of actors, the way a person or a red flag is stuck on top of the note it belongs to. Bring to front and send to back still reorder notes of the same kind.
Add your own layers if you want them: an ES board is an ordinary tab underneath, and the Layers panel works exactly as it does anywhere else.
How a Session Usually Runs
The method works in passes, and the note kinds are named for them:
- Big picture: orange domain events only, past tense, left to right in time order. Arguments about wording are the point; that is where the domain knowledge comes out.
- Process modelling: add the commands that cause events, the actors issuing them, the policies reacting, the read models people decide on, and the external systems the flow touches.
- Software design: add aggregates, the things commands act on, once the story is stable enough to draw boundaries around.
Red hotspots belong at any stage: a conflict, a question, or a risk nobody can resolve in the room.
Nothing in the editor enforces the passes. They are a way of running the session, not a mode you have to switch; the board is one surface throughout, and you can work whichever way the room does.
Everything Else Still Works
An event storming board is a normal tab with a specialised presentation, so the rest of the product applies unchanged: live presence, comments, exporting the tab, themes, and offline mode. Export a board and import it elsewhere and it arrives still knowing it is a board.
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