Team Topologies

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais

Introduction Pages

Types of team

The authors suggest there are 4 team types and 3 forms of interaction.

  1. Stream aligned - these are the core product streams which will work on a particular service or stream.
  2. Enabling - Teams which work on tools which are available for teams to use, such as devops pipelines or automation tooling.
  3. Complicated subsystem - teams which focus on software which is mainly proprietary and of significant complexity that it requires a team to work full time on it.
  4. Platform - core company infrastructure teams

Ways of interaction:

  1. X-as-a-service - teams provide a on-demand form of interacting with a service, such as API, such that this can be requested in an automated fashion.
  2. Facilitating - teams will provide some handover of how to use and maintain a tool, and will eventually leave the team requesting help to manage the interactions with their system themselves (usually in place for enablement type of work.)
  3. Collaboration - teams have a large amount of crossover to achieve the goal, and will work closely with one another