Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

As we have seen earlier in this chapter, there is an effective maximum size of seven to nine members for a team building and running software systems (see Figure 3.1 on page 34), so it follows that there is a maximum amount of cognitive load that a certain team can deal with. Many organizations do not consider the cognitive load on teams when assigning responsibility for parts of a software system, instead assuming that by adding more teams to the problem, the cognitive load will be shared across the teams. Instead, the teams will suffer from similar communication and interaction strains as mentioned in Brooks’s law.