Domain Storytelling: A Collaborative Approach to Domain-Driven Design
Domain-Driven Design (DDD) has transformed how we build software by ensuring our technical implementations reflect the nuances of business domains. Yet while DDD offers powerful conceptual frameworks, many teams struggle with the crucial first steps—establishing shared understanding and creating initial domain models. Domain storytelling addresses this gap by offering an accessible, human-centric approach to domain discovery.
The Challenge of Domain Exploration
The most challenging aspect of DDD isn’t implementing the patterns—it’s understanding the domain deeply enough to apply them effectively. Traditional approaches often fall short:
- Documentation reviews become mired in technical jargon
- Individual stakeholder interviews yield fragmented perspectives
- Whiteboarding sessions lack structure and produce inconsistent results
- Written requirements miss tacit knowledge and contextual understanding
These limitations often lead to incomplete domain models that fail to capture essential business rules and workflows. More concerningly, they create an illusion of understanding that only becomes apparent when the software meets real-world scenarios.
Domain Storytelling as a Solution
Domain storytelling offers a refreshing alternative that leverages our natural human capacity for narrative. At its core, the technique facilitates structured conversations where domain experts narrate how specific processes unfold, while a facilitator captures these stories using a simple visual language.
The approach differs from other modelling techniques in several important ways:
Concrete over abstract: Rather than beginning with abstract concepts, domain storytelling starts with concrete, specific examples that domain experts encounter daily.
Pictographic language: The visual notation uses intuitive symbols representing actors, work objects, and activities—making models immediately accessible to non-technical participants.
Sequential storytelling: By focusing on the sequential flow of activities, domain storytelling naturally reveals temporal dependencies and causal relationships.
Collaborative validation: The visual nature of the output enables immediate feedback and correction, ensuring the captured understanding reflects reality.
This combination creates an environment where domain experts can comfortably share their knowledge without needing to translate it into technical terms, while technical team members gain insights into the business domain’s complexities.
Practical Implementation
Facilitating effective domain storytelling sessions requires careful preparation:
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Select focused scenarios: Choose specific workflows or processes that represent core network operations, such as provisioning a new enterprise customer across an MPLS backbone, troubleshooting a BGP session flap, or implementing a zero-touch provisioning workflow for edge devices.
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Gather diverse domain experts: Include participants with different perspectives and responsibilities within the domain.
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Prepare visual tools: Whether physical (whiteboards, sticky notes) or digital (Miro, specialised tools like Egon.io), ensure the medium supports rapid visualisation.
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Establish notation conventions: While domain storytelling has suggested pictograms, adapt them to your domain’s specific needs.
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Capture the narrative: Record sessions to preserve nuances that might be missed in the visual representation.
The most powerful moments often come when network architects and operations teams disagree about how processes work—these contradictions frequently reveal edge cases, exceptions, or differing mental models about routing policies, traffic engineering, or security zones that must be reconciled before effective automation software can be designed. For instance, a discussion about BGP route selection might reveal different assumptions about which path attributes should take precedence in specific failure scenarios.
Complementarity with Event Storming
While domain storytelling excels at capturing sequential processes and actor interactions, it can be complemented by event storming when exploring complex domains. Event storming’s focus on domain events offers a broader perspective that helps identify aggregate boundaries and potential microservice divisions.
A hybrid approach often works well:
- Begin with domain storytelling to establish baseline understanding
- Transition to event storming to explore broader domain dynamics
- Return to domain storytelling to deep-dive into specific scenarios
This combination leverages the strengths of both techniques: domain storytelling’s accessibility and narrative focus, paired with event storming’s system-level perspective.
Beyond Initial Modelling
Domain storytelling offers value beyond initial domain discovery. In networking environments, the technique shines when:
- Onboarding new network engineers to complex network architectures
- Exploring edge cases such as network convergence during failures
- Validating controller designs against operational network realities
- Documenting domain knowledge about protocols like IS-IS, BGP, or EVPN-VXLAN overlays in an accessible format
- Capturing the tacit knowledge of senior network architects about scalability considerations and failure scenarios
As teams evolve their understanding, these stories become valuable artifacts that bridge the gap between business and technical perspectives—fulfilling the core promise of domain-driven design.
By starting with stories rather than abstractions, teams can build domain models grounded in real-world usage, creating software that truly speaks the language of the business.