Festive Tech Calendar 2023 - Twas the Night Before Christmas
This blog post is going to explore the events that happen in A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore using EventStorming. This is part of the 2023 Festive Tech Calendar.
Why EventStorming?
When I thought of topics for Festive Tech, I wanted to show how you can use EventStorming to evaluate a situation. Big Picture EventStorming combined with Process Modeling EventStorming makes sense, as there are a lot of things going on during the poem. If you don’t believe there’s a lot going on, let’s look at the EventStorming!
Common EventStorming Stickies
While going through the process of EventStorming the poem, I noticed I was using a few common colors for the first round.
Lavender Sticky Notes
The poem starts with “‘Twas the night before Christmas”. This is a statement that works well with “Whenever…”, which means that it makes sense to be captured as a policy. These are captured in EventStorming with lavender sticky notes.
Orange Sticky Notes
This should be no surprised. When EventStorming, events are commonly represented by orange sticky notes. These events typically answer “What happened?“. They are the base element for EventStorming.
Yellow Sticky Notes
Yellow sticky notes are used to represent users, roles, or personas. These are the people or things that either trigger the events or may be impacted by the events. Sometimes, we know who is impacted and sometimes it’s left open. These answer the questions of “Who/What did it?” or “Who/what’s impacted?“.
Things Happening in Parallel
After laying out what happened throughout the poem, you may notice that the same roles may be repeated often. It might make more sense to present their work as a timeline with swimlanes - rows of work for each role.
If there are co-roles that work with others but don’t have their own swimlanes, they can still stay as a user role within their coworkers.
Miro has a swimlanes diagram template that can help us with the lanes. I’m going to use this to make it easy to identify the user/role/persona for each row.
We’ll create lanes for the narrator, St. Nick, the coursers, and Others.
Key Events
Sometimes, when organizing the events in a timeline, it might help to identify key events and plot the rest of the events in relation to those key events.
When building the swimlanes for this poem, I came up with the following key events:
- Clatter arose
- Miniature sleigh and 8 tiny reindeer appeared
- St. Nick went straight to work
I pulled out these events and put them at the top. When they were role-specific, I included the role with the event so it was clear that this is a major event that is handled by some user/role/persona.
As you can see with the swimlanes, there’s a lot going on in this story and involving different personas.
Bonus: Animated Video
This initially started out as just a video for Festive Tech Calendar. However, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to show how this could be done with Miro and sticky notes as well. So this post shows potential EventStorming of the “Twas the night before Christmas…” poem using Miro.
Check out this video where I read the poem and have the sticky notes appear when it’s their turns.
YouTube video: “Twas the Night Before Christmas - EventStorming Holiday”
Additional References
If you want to learn more about EventStorming, I recommend checking out the following sites: