Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

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

Team Topologies provides four fundamental team types—stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem—and three core team interaction modes—collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and facilitating. Together with awareness of Conway’s law, team cognitive load, and how to become a sensing organization, Team Topologies results in an effective and

The third heuristic is that a team responsible for a complex domain should not have any more domains assigned to them—not even a simple one.

apply the reverse Conway maneuver: designing teams to match the desired architecture.

By team, we mean a stable grouping of five to nine people who work toward a shared goal as a unit.

A fracture plane is a natural seam in the software system that allows the system to be split easily into two or more parts. This

Organizations that rely too heavily on org charts and matrixes to split and control work often fail to create the necessary conditions to embrace innovation while still delivering at a fast pace. In

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.

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

Instead, teams should view themselves as stewards or caretakers as opposed to private owners. Think of code as gardening, not policing.