Reading time 3 min

Peter Hardeel

Nowadays, there is constant talk about the importance of a 'real-time enterprise' that can immediately notice and respond to any event or request. So, what does it mean to be ‘real-time’? Real-time technology is crucial for organizations because real-time decision-making is a competitive differentiator in today's fast-paced world. A real-time application requires the ability to ingest, structure, analyze and act on data in real-time. The emphasis lies on providing insights and decision-making whenever an event occurs, rather than days or even weeks afterwards. Today’s business systems are primarily capable of providing what a real-time application promises: collecting data in real-time. Another criterion, which is analyzing this data and gaining valuable insight in real-time, is a whole other challenge. It is also often confused with the former, diverting attention from what should be the main considerations when planning a real-time application: What are the decisions your business needs to make when receiving data? What slows down your business in making those decisions? How will your business benefit from this ability to make decisions? Enterprises must first be able to answer these considerations and make them clear to the rest of the business before the successful implementation of a real-time application can be guaranteed. Goals of real-time The sole purpose of a real-time application is to make decisions in real-time. As these applications will control a much larger part of an enterprise, close cooperation with humans will offer significant advantages and become a requirement in the future. Software will automate deterministic functions and standardized activities. At the same time, humans will add experience, intuition, and values to: assure the most appropriate actions are taken, intervene when they are not, and take charge when it is not clear enough what to do. By interactions, we mean communication that goes far beyond text, email or chat systems. We are talking about truly sophisticated collaborative relationships in which a software application and a human being communicate and are each aware of the context of what is happening, how a situation changes over time, and what choices or recommendations are likely to produce the best results. The 3 steps to become a real-time enterprise Now that we’ve established what a real-time enterprise is: how do you become one? There are 3 key steps to take into account: Put business needs first: adopt the mindset to create and change both business and operational processes with a real-time-first attitude. For example: allowing certain automatic decisions depending on what data streams are feeding your applications. Speaking of data… get it right! Moving to real-time also requires robust data management that supports both emerging streaming data and traditional data sources for real-time data integration. Look to the edge: as we’ve already established, going to real-time also requires implementing real-time analytics where the data originates and delivering analytics. This requires autonomous support to perform analytics closer to the data source without connecting to the cloud, creating more flexible and powerful deployments. With edge computing, organizations can ingest, enrich and analyze data locally, run machine learning models on cleansed datasets and deliver enhanced predictive capabilities. The velocity and volume of data arriving in real-time require in-memory stream analytics and complex event processing. It requires a shift from a traditional 3-tier database-centric architecture (with presentation, application and data tiers) to a modern event-driven architecture method of application development. Conclusion Although we’ve only scratched the surface, we hope this article has shown you how exciting and valuable real-time applications can be. If you want to learn more or explore ways to implement these technologies into your business, get in touch. We would be happy to help you transform into a real-time enterprise!

Reading time 5 min

Peter Hardeel

What is Event Storming? Before getting into details, let’s discuss EventStorming’s role in an agile context. Event Storming has become a very popular methodology during the past years and has found its place in the software development lifecycle as a requirements gathering technique. Created by Alberto Brandolini in 2012 as an alternative to precise UML diagramming, Event Storming is a workshop-style technique that brings project stakeholders together (both developers and non-technical users) to explore complex business domains in domain-driven design architecture . One of the strengths of Event Storming is being able to focus on the business stakeholders and the high level of interaction. The technique is straightforward and requires no technical training at all. Using Event Storming, there are different goals you can pursue: identify improvement areas of an existing business flow; explore if a new business model is viable; gain insight into a shared understanding of how a business operates; design clean and maintainable Event-Driven software. There are three primary levels of abstraction for Event Storming: Big picture: used for exploring the current understanding of the system by gathering key people with different backgrounds and creating a shared understanding. Process modelling: in this level, we model a single business process from start to finish, clarifying all the business rules and making sure everyone is aligned. Software design: in this last step, we start designing the software based on building blocks from Domain-Driven Design and a reactive programming paradigm. Each sticky note potentially turns into a software artefact during the implementation phase. When applying Event Storming, you first need to identify the Domain Events in the problem domain on a timeline. The source of a Domain Event could be the following: A user interaction An event coming The result of time passing by The consequence of another Domain Event. We then write this domain event down on an orange sticky note. When all domain events are defined, the second step is to find the command that caused these domain events. Commands are written on blue notes and placed directly before the corresponding domain event. Finally, you’ll need to identify the aggregates within which commands are executed and where events happen are identified. These aggregates are written down on yellow sticky notes. Using the System Modeler In the past years, we have embraced Event Storming as a requirements gathering technique within ACA-IT Solutions – so much so, that it’s now an integrated part of our portfolio and how we develop software for our customers. If you’d like more details about that or want to know more about Event Storming, you can contact us here . The System Modeler uses EventStorming as an inspiration for documenting (modelling) the events that represent business processes, configuring high-level properties associated with those events, then allowing automatic generation of Apps and Collaboration Types from the model. A System Modeler session involves the use of five virtual sticky notes to represent: Event: something that happens in the business Reaction: responses to events Command: user-driven actions that produce events External System: systems that are external to the business Issue: document potential problems or unknowns about events The System Modeler also makes use of one container: Bounded Context: contain notes that share a common vocabulary Below, you can see the result of an EventStorming session in the System Modeler, representing a city’s pothole reporting and tracking system. The model represents: a mobile app that allows city residents to report a pothole creation of new database records to document reported potholes real-time notification of city services of new pothole reports enable workers to update the status of a pothole real-time notification to the reporting resident when the status has changed System Modeler is a great way to bridge the gap between the requirements gathering of an event-driven application and the actual implementation. In this case, we’re doing that electronically on the canvas. Moreover, this is a collaborative environment, allowing several people to work on this model at the same time. Using the System Modeler, users can collaborate with multiple individuals not only in a given room, but across any number of geographic locations. This is an awesome way to genuinely do a sort of distributed requirements gathering session. Even more so with the pandemic still preventing lots of people from going into the office! From requirements to superfast POCs Based on this requirements gathering session, we can now take this requirements model and create an application. All users need to do is switch from ‘model mode’ to ‘generate mode’ and group the various elements. After having defined topics and collaboration tasks, you just click on the Generate button. This simple action alone generates about 70% of this particular application’s code! This makes System Modeler probably the easiest way to very quickly move from application requirements design into application development itself. Conclusion Modern applications need to operate in real-time as they will be driven by what’s happening at that time in the real world. They’ll need to easily incorporate artificial intelligence and IoT technology, and the applications themselves will need to be distributed at the source of the events. The software logic will need to be able to run everywhere (cloud, edge, on-premises). These applications will also require integrating human-beings in the process for when a higher level of intuition and reasoning is needed. With System Modeler, it’s easy to quickly generate a very large portion of such an application. After all, the System Modeler has the ability to gather requirements from business users, domain experts, and developers and very quickly turn those requirements into a running event-driven application. Creating these superfast POCs is a breeze! If you want to learn more about how ACA Group and event-driven technology can help accelerate your digital transformation, please contact us! Our services