Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

The real implications of Conway’s law are almost completely ignored by most organizations, leading to, at best, happy accidents with architectural choices and, at worst, significant ongoing friction as the organization spends time and effort “fighting” the homomorphic force. Similarly, many organizations are unaware of how a poorly chosen “reorg” can destroy an organization’s strategic capability for innovation and sustainable software delivery. There is an often bewildering range of team models and scaled delivery frameworks with apparently very little to distinguish them. Furthermore, the behavior patterns of teams are rarely specified, leaving teams without clear guidelines for effective interaction with other teams, resulting in either too-tight inter-team coupling or a kind of isolationist autonomy that doesn’t really scale. Team Topologies helps to address all these points by setting forth a team-first approach to software delivery predicated on four fundamental team types, three team interaction patterns, and ways of using difficulties in delivery that empower the organization to sense its surroundings. In effect, Team Topologies presents a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps to make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization. This is summarized in Figure 9.1: Figure 9.1: Core Ideas of Team Topologies