Matthew Skelton

The combination of well-defined teams and well-defined interaction modes provides a powerful and flexible organizational capability for structural adaptation to changing external and internal conditions, enabling the organization to “sense” its environment, modify its activities, and focus to fit.

What must be avoided is the need for all teams to communicate with all other teams in order to achieve their ends; just as a jazz band coordinates the music it plays, we should expect to carefully curate the communication that takes place within an organization.The combination of well-defined teams and well-defined interaction modes provides a powerful and flexible organizational capability for structural adaptation to changing external and internal conditions, enabling the organization to “sense” its environment, modify its activities, and focus to fit.

By carefully exploring and validating the boundaries of responsibility between teams… we align the software architecture to the problem domain, increasing the flow of changes and providing the organization with the capability to evolve the sociotechnical system more rapidly and effectively.

Many organizations struggling with rapid, sustainable software delivery have a wide range of different types of teams, each with different (usually poorly defined) responsibilities. To avoid this problem, restrict teams to just four fundamental types… This focuses the organization on team interaction patterns that are known to promote flow at both personal and organizational levels.

Organizations must design teams intentionally by asking these questions: Given our skills, constraints, cultural and engineering maturity, desired software architecture, and business goals, which team topology will help us deliver results faster and safer? Where should the boundaries be in the software system in order to preserve system viability and encourage rapid flow?

The team-first approach provides opportunities for many kinds of people to thrive in an organization. Instead of needing a thick skin or resilience in order to survive in an organization that atomizes individuals, people in a team-first organization have the space and support to develop their skills and practices within the context of a team.

With open-plan offices and, particularly, with ubiquitous, instant communication via chat tools, anyone can communicate with anyone else. In this situation, one can accidentally fall into a pattern of communication and interaction where everyone needs to communicate with everyone else... From the viewpoint of Conway’s law, this will drive unintended consequences for the software systems, especially a lack of modularity between subsystems.

We must shift our thinking from treating teams as collections of interchangeable individuals that will succeed as long as they follow the “right” process and use the “right” tools, to treating people and technology as a single human/computer carbon/silicon sociotechnical ecosystem.

Organizations which design systems . . . are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.