From Business Goals to Software Requirements - with Impact Mapping and Domain Storytelling

Building software that fulfills business goals is the core task of software development teams. To turn business goals into software, stakeholders must have shared artifacts to align their needs and priorities. Those artifacts have many names: requirements, features, user stories, use cases, specifications, etc.

As Domain-Driven Design practitioners, we believe that software requirements are best created as a result of a collaborative modeling process. Impact Mapping and Domain Storytelling are collaborative modeling methods that support conversations about requirements. They help you to approach requirements from two different angles:
- Linking business goals with impacts that a software product has on its users.
- Designing cohesive and viable business processes as Domain Stories.

In this hands-on workshop, we will show you how:
- Impact Mapping and Domain Storytelling work together
- to apply these methods on a case study in small groups
- to learn to have conversations about WHY you need to build WHAT
- to turn individual requirements into business processes

Finally, we will give you some pointers on how to organize requirements and drill down to implementable domain models.

Transcript

1. From Business Goals to Software Requirements with Impact Mapping and Domain Storytelling NDC Oslo 2024 Mufrid Krilic, Domain-Driven Design Coach CoWork, Norway
2. What is the problem we are trying to solve?
4. Communication Business Technology
5. Communication Vague Precise
6. Communication Strategic Operative
7. Business Needs Could be fuzzy and imprecisely formulated
8. Translation! Software executes as a very precise translation of human needs into specific instructions
9. Does it matter? “it’s developer (mis)understanding that’s released in production, not the experts’ knowledge” – Alberto Brandolini
10. What will we cover in next 2 hours?
11. Business Goals Software Requirements
12. What can you expect to learn in next 2 hours? Learn that tools to assist you exist and get encouraged to try it for yourself Understanding there is a way to navigate between: Business Intent => Actionable Requirements
13. The Purpose • One workshop method => Good • Two workshop methods => Great • Combining different methods?
14. Workshop Facilitation – The Real Value Combining different methods to be able to adapt to dynamic and complex environments
15. What I do…. Helping Build Domain-Driven Product Organizations Product Development Coaching
16. Agenda When What 0900 Intro  You are Here Part 1 From Business goals to Impacts Impact Mapping Demo 30 minutes Exercise/Skill Builder Q&A 1000-1020 Break Review Part 1 Part 2 From Impacts to Software Requirements Combining Impact Mapping and Domain Storytelling Domain Storytelling Demo 30 minutes Exercise/Skill Builder Q&A 1115 Wrap-up with references for further study
17. Slides Available! Get them here: https://tinyurl.com/ndc-oslo-2024-workshop
19. From Business Goals to Impacts Workshop Part 1
20. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Impact Mapping ▪ “An impact map is a visualization of scope and underlying assumptions, created collaboratively, by (senior) technical and business people” ▪ Gojko Adzic, Impact Mapping, the book impactmapping.org
21. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Four questions to ask to facilitate the conversation about business intent! • Business goal Why? • Role/Actor Who? • Impact How? • Deliverable • Experiment What? Software Goes Here
24. Demo Impact Mapping
30. These are your traditional software requirements!
31. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Finding What-part in the Impact Map • …is discovering software requirements by connecting deliverables with impacts and goals • Part 2 of the Workshop!
32. We stop here, on the impact level!
33. Exercise Impact Mapping
35. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Actors Who can contribute to the goal?
36. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Actors Who can obstruct us reaching the goal?
37. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Actors Whose behavior do we want to impact?
38. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Impact Behavior change!
39. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Impact Measurable!
40. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Impact Mapping Exercise 1. Add more actors to the map 2. Add impacts (for new or existing actors) to the map a) Challenge each other • Did you really capture the behavior change? • Is it measurable? 3. Prioritize the impact with the most business value a) According to your own assessment
41. Exercise: • Add more actors • Add more impacts • Prioritize
42. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Break 20 minutes! Product Development Coaching
43. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Agenda When What 0900 Intro Part 1 From Business goals to Impacts Impact Mapping Demo 30 minutes Exercise/Skill Builder Q&A 1000-1020 Break Review Part 1  You are here Part 2 From Impacts to Software Requirements Combining Impact Mapping and Domain Storytelling Domain Storytelling Demo 30 minutes Exercise/Skill Builder Q&A 1115 Wrap-up with references for further study
44. Review Part 1 Suggestions on Actors and Impacts
47. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Software Requirements Prioritization Prioritize on the Impacts!
48. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Software Requirements Prioritization Easier to agree on prioritization with stakeholders
49. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Software Requirements Prioritization Prioritization aligned with the business intent!
50. From Impacts to Software Requirements Workshop Part 2
51. Combining Impact Mapping and Domain Storytelling
52. Software Requirements Connect deliverables with behavior changes!
53. Software Requirements Discover requirements with Domain Storytelling!
54. domainstorytelling.org domainstorytelling.org
55. Different kinds of Domain Stories • Highlight • bottlenecks • “pain” As-Is • Highlight • Requirements To-Be Discovers What-part of the Impact Map Specifies What-part of the Impact Map
56. Collaborative Modeling! Right people in the room! Domain experts explain the business process as a scenario or example Visualize! Facilitator visualizes the scenario as a Domain Story Repeat! Domain experts confirm if the visualized story is correct
58. Demo AS-IS Domain Stories Domain Storytelling
60. Domain Story AS-IS: Movie Scheduling To understand the impact: Highlight bottlenecks/pain and discover What-part of the Impact Map
64. Domain Stories AS-IS • Highlight • bottlenecks • “pain” As-Is Discovers What-part of the Impact Map
66. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Any rules?
67. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 No Branching or Parallel Flows Focus on what happens in the domain not on what could happen
68. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 ▪ An actor should not occur more than once in a story ▪ A work object can occur multiple times Make Story Readable!
69. Demo TO-BE Domain Stories Domain Storytelling
70. Domain Story TO-BE: Movie Scheduling To achieve the impact: Highlight the requirements and specify What-part of the Impact Map
74. Domain Stories TO-BE • Highlight • Requirements To-Be Specifies What-part of the Impact Map
76. Exercise Domain Storytelling
78. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Domain Storytelling Exercise • If you are happy with the impacts you found in Part 1 • Create To-Be Domain Story for one of the impacts in your map • Otherwise • Create To-Be Domain Story for one of the suggested impacts • Highlight the requirements
79. Wrap-up Where to go from here?
81. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Core Domain • The thing that distinguishes you from the competitors • “Not every part of the system will be well-designed” • Generic subdomain • Supporting subdomain
82. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Extracting Core Domain from Impact Map Business goals and impacts give you hints on what is the current most important thing for the organization
83. Product Architecture Which users are we tailoring our products for? The cost of customizing the product for diverse user groups The cost of developing separate products for separate user groups
84. Software Architecture Aligning system boundaries with business intent Re-usable generic domain model that can be adapted to serve needs of multiple user groups Specific domain model highly aligned with needs of specific user groups
85. Questions at menti.com 5974 1687 Extracting Boundaries from Domain Stories Communication paths between the actors and the systems give you hint on subdomains and data ownership
86. Further Study
87. Practice! Start on Monday! Somewhere in safe environments then improve!
88. Book by Gojko Adzic impactmapping.org Impact Mapping: Making a big impact with software products and projects
89. Book by Stefan Hofer and Henning Schwentner domainstorytelling.org Collaborative, Visual and Agile Way to Build Domain-Driven Software
90. Thank You! Get in touch! Product Development Coaching
92. Images • Vecteezy.com • Tim Hüfner • https://unsplash.com/@joshua_hoehne • https://unsplash.com/@kattyukawa • https://unsplash.com/@brett_jordan