Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

Match Software Boundary Size to Team Cognitive Load To keep software delivery teams effective and able to own and evolve parts of the software systems, we need to take a team-first approach to the size of software subsystems and the placement of boundaries. Instead of designing a system in the abstract, we need to design the system and its software boundaries to fit the available cognitive load within delivery teams. Instead of choosing between a monolithic architecture or a microservices architecture, design the software to fit the maximum team cognitive load. Only then can we hope to achieve sustainable, safe, rapid software delivery. This team-first approach to software boundaries leads to favoring certain styles of software architecture, such as small, decoupled services. We can visualize this team-first approach to software subsystem boundaries in Figure 3.3 (see page 45).