How to Structure Teams for Building Better Software Products
Team Topologies Book Summary
The team topology approach treats humans and technology as a single sociotechnical ecosystem, and thus it takes a team-sized architecture approach (people first) rather than a technology-first approach, e.g., the monolith vs microservices debate. NOTE: If you have microservices but are still waiting to do end-to-end testing of a combination of services, you have a distributed monolith (a distributed monolith is when all changes in a service require updates to other services).
If you know you need to deploy different parts of the system independently, you need to decouple services. In this environment, you should make your teams small and decoupled with clear boundaries. These boundaries should represent the business context and always be designed with the user in mind. These small decoupled team models also help to minimize intrinsic cognitive load and eliminate extraneous cognitive load.
With well-defined and stable communication pathways between teams, organizations can detect signals from across the organization and outside it, becoming something like an organism. This helps to adjust team interaction…
