Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

It is usually best to try to align software boundaries with the different business domain areas. A

By empowering teams, and treating them as fundamental building blocks, individuals inside those teams move closer together to act as a team rather than just a group of people. On the other hand, by explicitly agreeing on interaction modes with other teams, expectations on behaviors become clearer and inter-team trust grows.

Research has shown that the similarity of team mental models is a good predictor of team performance, meaning fewer mistakes, more coherent code, and more rapid delivery of outcomes.

A digital platform is a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge and support which are arranged as a compelling internal product. Autonomous delivery teams can make use of the platform to deliver product features at a higher pace, with reduced coordination.

Helping stream-aligned teams achieve this high rate of flow are enabling teams (which identify impediments and cross-team challenges, and simplify the adoption of new approaches), complicated-subsystem teams (if needed, to bring deep specialist expertise to specific parts of the system), and platform teams (which

In high-trust organizations, people may change teams once a year without major detrimental effects on team performance.

Conway’s law tells us that an organization’s structure and the actual communication paths between teams persevere in the resulting architecture of the systems built.

The first heuristic is to assign each domain to a single team. If

Whichever kind of stream of changes a stream-aligned team is aligned to, that team is funded in a long-term, sustainable manner as part of a portfolio or program of work, not as a fleeting project.