Team Topologies Ensure Stability to Organize in Flux

Like a secret backdoor to the data mesh, Team Topologies [1] by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais unfolds the organizational dimensions of federated architectures designed for fast flow. Skelton and Pais point at the white space on the organization chart surrounding all the boxes and lines and suggest that the truth about how cloud-based software and IT, managed at scale, is found exactly there. Highlighting the inefficacies in the reality that system design copies communication design, known as Conway’s Law, Skelton and Pais thinks beyond the given organization to reverse the reality found in the vast majority of complex, industrial enterprises.

To alter that reality, Skelton and Pais put forward a topology of teams capable of developing and operating software at the highest speed possible. The topology of teams consists first and foremost of Stream-Aligned Teams for continuous flow of work for a business domain. Further, Enabling Teams consisting of specialists knowledgeable about a specific technical domain that unlike — poorly performed — enterprise architecture — provide hands-on technical advice for the stream aligned teams. Also, a Complicated-subsystems team is set up when the cognitive load is too big for one single team to handle, as defined by the metrics in Dunbar’s number. Finally, the Platform Team is set up to enable the stream-aligned team to perform their tasks autonomously, reducing the cognitive load of the Stream-Aligned team for all supporting services they are in need of. The overall topology of teams transform as time passes and corporate objectives change, and that is exactly the plasticity Skelton and Pais puts forward, and that is how team topologies ensure stability to organize in flux.

As a delicate system of chinese boxes, once opened the topologies of teams contains inside it a topology of software monoliths: the various ways software can evolve into the unfortunate reality of the one, big, single stone. Learning from the stonemasons in ancient Greece, Skelton and Pais advices on how to find the best angles to split the various monoliths and in doing so let you succeed with software by the help of Team Topologies

[1] M. Skelton; M. Pais, Team Topologies (2019), IT Revolution Press