Team Topologies identifies four types of teams: streamline teams, enabling teams, complicated subsystem teams, and platform teams, which work together to support effective software delivery.
Team Topologies introduces three interaction modes between teams: collaboration, facilitating, and access service, aiming to promote effective knowledge sharing, problem-solving, and self-service capabilities among teams.
Team Topologies emphasizes the importance of communication patterns within an organization and the mirroring effect they have on the socio-technical architecture, highlighting the need for empathy, understanding, and collaboration between teams working within the system.
Deep dives
The Four Team Types in Team Topologies
Team Topologies identifies four types of teams: streamline teams, enabling teams, complicated subsystem teams, and platform teams. Streamline teams have end-to-end responsibility for a specific part of the software and are aligned to a stream of change. Enabling teams support streamline teams by bridging capability gaps and helping them acquire new skills. Complicated subsystem teams handle complex processing or calculations to reduce cognitive load on streamline teams. Platform teams act as a group of teams that focus on accelerating the flow of change, reducing cognitive load, and providing developer experience. These four team types work together to support effective software delivery.
The Three Interaction Modes in Team Topologies
Team Topologies also introduces three interaction modes between teams: collaboration, facilitating, and access service. Collaboration involves two teams working together for a defined period of time to solve a specific problem. Facilitating occurs when one team helps another team gain knowledge or understand a particular domain. Access service allows one team to provide services that can be consumed by other teams without direct communication. These interaction modes aim to promote effective knowledge sharing, problem-solving, and self-service capabilities among teams.
The Impact of Team Topologies on Software Architecture
Team Topologies has implications for software architecture and quality attributes. By decoupling software and teams, it creates opportunities to improve reliability and security. The clarity of purpose and defined boundaries in teams help with security, as conflicts and ambiguities are reduced. Decoupling also allows for the introduction of reliability-enhancing mechanisms, like bulkheads and retry mechanisms. Additionally, Team Topologies emphasizes the importance of situational awareness, guiding organizations to make intentional decisions about what to build, when to use external services, and what to let go of. This approach aligns with the concept of thin viable platforms and enables organizations to focus their resources on what truly differentiates them.
The influence of communication on socio-technical architecture
One of the main ideas discussed in the podcast is the influence of communication on socio-technical architecture, which is referred to as Conway's law. The podcast emphasizes that the communication patterns within an organization have a strong mirroring effect on the architecture and vice versa. This means that the team structure and communication pathways tend to align with the existing architecture. The importance of acknowledging this tendency and recognizing the relationship between communication lines, organization, and architecture is highlighted. This awareness leads to an increased emphasis on empathy, understanding, and collaboration between teams working within the social-technical system.
The role of evolving and adapting in team dynamics
The podcast also emphasizes the significance of evolving and adapting in team dynamics. While the book 'Team Topologies' focuses on specific team types and interaction modes, the podcast highlights that the real power lies in how teams use and evolve these patterns over time. The importance of applying product thinking to internal platforms is discussed, along with the need for teams to be open to collaboration, learning, and asking for help. The podcast acknowledges that this requires a cultural shift within organizations, where there is no penalty for not knowing or admitting mistakes. The idea of sense-making and continuous learning in an evolutionary way is emphasized as a key insight.
Discussion includes motivation for writing the Team Topologies book. How can TT approach help to build software that is more secure? Techniques, challenges, recommendations when adopting TT.
Manuel Pais is co-author ofTeam Topologies: organizing business and technology teams for fast flow. Recognized by TechBeacon as a DevOps thought leader, Manuel is an independent IT organizational consultant and trainer, focused on team interactions, delivery practices and accelerating flow. Manuel is also a LinkedIn instructor on Continuous Delivery.
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