Carving Microservices out of the Monolith with Domain Storytelling
summary
Domain Storytelling teaches how to find microservice boundaries by having users tell step-by-step scenarios and drawing them with a simple pictographic language so you can see where responsibilities cluster. It uses actors, work objects, activities on a canvas (whiteboard, sticky notes or egan.io and sticky notes), maps sentences to classes and methods (work object → class, activity → method), and surfaced subdomains like sales vs risk assessment in a car‑leasing example; recipe: analyze domain, audit the monolith, then incrementally strangler out bounded contexts (LeasingNinja.io case studies).
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chapters (16)
- 0:00The car leasing monolith
- 1:21Modeling the domain story
- 4:27Collaborative modeling basics
- 7:18Workshop and communication
- 10:40Active listening and sketching
- 13:38Pictographic language
- 16:11Scenario-based modeling
- 20:55Understanding story scope
- 23:05Tools for storytelling
- 24:33Train travel exercise
- 32:32Designing software from stories
- 37:05The problem with one big model
- 39:23Breaking down the monolith
- 43:44Implementing bounded contexts
- 45:55The strangler fig pattern
- 50:53Conclusion and resources
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