Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

by Matthew Skelton

Many organizations have significant flaws in the way their teams interact as part of building and running software systems. Specifically, such organizations seem to assume that software delivery is a one-way process, leading from specification to design, from design to coding, from coding to testing and releasing, and from releasing to business as usual (BAU) operation (see Figure 4.1). Figure 4.1: Organization not Optimized for Flow of Change Traditional flow of change in an organization not optimized for flow, with a series of groups owning different activities and handing over the work to the next team. No information flows back from the live systems into teams building the software. This linear, stepwise sequence of changes—usually with separate functional silo divisions for each stage—(as seen in Figure 4.1)—is completely incompatible with the speed of change and complexity of modern software systems.