Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

A cross-functional feature team can bring high value to an organization by delivering cross-component, customer-centric features much faster than multiple component teams making their own changes and synchronizing into a single release. But this can only happen when the feature team is self-sufficient, meaning they are able to deliver features into production without waiting for other teams. The feature team typically needs to touch multiple codebases, which might be owned by different component teams. If the team does not have a high degree of engineering maturity, they might take shortcuts, such as not automating tests for new user workflows or not following the “boy-scout rule” (leaving the code better than they found it). Over time, this leads to a breakdown of trust between teams as technical debt increases and slows down delivery speed. A lack of ownership over shared code may result from the cumulative effects of several teams working on the same codebase unless inter-team discipline is high.