Event Storming fills the room with orange sticky notes. Event Sourcing records every state transition as an immutable fact. But then comes testing and suddenly all that domain clarity risks getting buried under technical ceremony.
It does not have to be this way.
In this presentation, I will show how the concepts you already know from Event Storming map directly onto a testing approach that is precise, readable, and genuinely expressive. Domain Events become fixtures and assertions. Commands become the subject under test. Hotspots become edge cases. The Given/When/Then pattern stops being a buzzword and becomes a natural fit for an architecture that already thinks in terms of past events, present commands, and expected outcomes.
But verification is only the beginning. When your tests speak the language of your domain, they can do more than pass or fail. I will demonstrate how the structured information captured during test execution can be used to automatically generate living documentation in Event Storming notation - closing the loop from collaborative modelling workshop back to the running system.
The examples are written in PHP, but the patterns and principles are architectural, not linguistic. Whether your team works in Java, C#, Go, or any other language, the insight is the same: when you align your test framework with your architecture, testing transforms from a burden into a bridge.
I most recently presented “From Events to Insights: Testing and Documenting Event‑Based Software” at the PHP Developer Day on in Dresden. Previous events include PHP User Group Frankfurt am Main, Dutch PHP Conference, and PHP UK Conference.
I am Sebastian Bergmann. I started writing PHPUnit in 2000 and still maintain it. In the same year I gave my first talk at a PHP conference. PHPUnit has been installed more than a billion times from Packagist, and a new major version comes out every February.
As a co-founder of The PHP Consulting Company (thePHP.cc), I work with teams on their tests: on test strategy and test design, on testable code, on fast test runs and on upgrades to current versions of PHPUnit. More on this under consulting and coaching.
Where you can meet me next is listed under events. The next dates of my training courses are in the training overview.
On , I will be in Frankfurt am Main at the PIMCORE Community Dev Days. There I will give the presentation “Speed is a byproduct of trust”.
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