Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

Enabling: a team that assists other teams in adopting and modifying software as part of a transition or learning period.

Collaboration mode: two teams work together on a shared goal, particularly during discovery of new technology or approaches. The overhead is valuable due to the rapid pace of learning.

X-as-a-Service mode: one team consumes something provided by another team (such as an API, a tool, or a full software product).

X-as-a-Service mode: one team consumes something provided by another team (such as an API, a tool, or a full software product). Collaboration is minimal.

The Team Topologies approach treats the team as the fundamental means of delivery, where a team is not simply a collection of individuals with the same manager but an entity with its own learning, goals, mission, and reasonable autonomy.

The Team Topologies approach treats the team as the fundamental means of delivery, where a team is not simply a collection of individuals with the same manager but an entity with its own learning, goals, mission, and reasonable autonomy. A team learns and delivers together because when this happens, the results

The Team Topologies approach treats the team as the fundamental means of delivery, where a team is not simply a collection of individuals with the same manager but an entity with its own learning, goals, mission, and reasonable autonomy. A team learns and delivers together because when this happens, the results far outperform mere collections of individuals.

This “team-sized architecture” focuses on people first, and is a more sustainable and humane approach to software architecture than either monolithic or microservices architectures, both of which focus on the technology first.

large, up-front designs by software architects are doomed to fail unless the designs align with the way in which the teams communicate.

Teams have a greater chance of innovating and supporting a system if they can understand the constituent parts and feel a sense of ownership over the code, rather than being treated like workers on an assembly line.

Team Topologies is not static but capable of and expected to change as the situation changes.

A healthy organizational culture: an environment that supports the professional development of individuals and teams—one in which people feel empowered and safe to speak out about problems, and the organization expects to learn continuously.

Good engineering practices: test-first design and development of all aspects of the systems, a focus on continuous delivery and operability practices, pairing and mobbing for code review,

Good engineering practices: test-first design and development of all aspects of the systems, a focus on continuous delivery and operability practices, pairing and mobbing for code review, avoiding the search for a single “root cause” for incidents, designing for testability, and so on.

Clarity of business vision: the executive or leadership provides a clear, non-conflicting vision and direction for the rest of the organization, with horizons at human-relevant timescales (such as three months, six months, twelve months) and clear reasoning behind the priorities, so people in the organization can understand how and why these were chosen.

Software cannot be expected to grow and thrive—even with excellent patterns for pruning and planting provided by Team Topologies—if the environmental conditions are hostile.

What does the team need in order to: Act and operate as an effective team? Own part of the software effectively? Focus on meeting the needs of users? Reduce unnecessary cognitive load? Consume and provide software and information to other teams?

Stream-aligned teams should be aligned to the streams you identify. These high-level streams should match the “change pressure” from the core of your organization.

a platform can be “just big enough” to meet the flow needs for the streams:

Remember: technology is only ever a part of the platform; roadmaps, guided evolution, clear documentation, a concern for DevEx, and appropriate encapsulation of underlying complexity are all key parts of an effective delivery platform for stream-aligned teams.