User Journey, User Story vs Domain Story: What’s the difference?

<div class="cs-rating pd-rating" id="pd_rating_holder_1819065_post_1908"></div> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">While running DDD workshops with clients, I have had this question come up several times – “What is the difference between a Domain story vs a User Story?” </p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">Here is a quick look at differences:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"><li><strong>User journey story:</strong> Is a technique for describing how the <strong>user interacts </strong>with our business (and business systems) <strong>over time</strong> to realise an end goal</li><li><strong>User story</strong>: Is a technique to describe specific functions the user must perform at each stage of a journey. It describes <strong>how a user interacts</strong> with our business or business system at a <strong>point-in-time</strong></li><li><strong>Domain story</strong>: Is a technique for capturing the behaviour and actions of the user (actor) with our systems and the deeper impact of this action to our systems and its sub-systems. It is a way to describe <strong>what </strong>happens to our <strong>business information systems when a user interacts</strong> with them</li></ul> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><a href="https://alok-mishra.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/alokmishra-user-story-vs-domain-story.jpg"><img src="https://alok-mishra.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/alokmishra-user-story-vs-domain-story.jpg?w=1024&quot; alt="" class="wp-image-1910" width="828" height="544" /></a></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">So what?</h2> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">Recognising these differences should help when domain storytelling. We do domain storytelling in our DDD journey to understand how we model our software better to handle specific business contextsd</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Summary</strong></h2> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">The process of using Domain Driven Design (DDD) to model software and software interactions compared to other design techniques (system oriented, layer oriented, bottom-up etc) relied on foundational techniques such as Domain Storytelling, Context Mapping etc. </p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">Domain storytelling is key to understanding what happens to our software system as user’s interact with it as compared to User Story which might consider only the superficial aspect of a user interaction (Portal, Mobile or CRM) and leave the rest as ambiguous technical stuff a solution team needs to figure out </p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">As a DDD practitioner, I love the domain storytelling aspect as it builds a view of how user interactions are facilitated by software (how did information get here in the first place? what are the pre-conditions?) and the impact to the state of the information in our systems as the effect of the interactions propagate (when a user submits something what happens next?)</p>