[2017.11 Meetup] [TALK] Matthew Skelton - How and Why to Design Your Teams for Modern Software Systems

For effective, modern, cloud-connected software systems we need to organize our teams in certain ways. Taking account of Conway’s Law, we look to match the team structures to the required software architecture, enabling or restricting communication and collaboration for the best outcomes. This talk will cover the basics of organization design, exploring a selection of key team topologies and how and when to use them in order to make the development and operation of your software systems as effective as possible. The talk is based on experience helping companies around the world with the design of their teams.

Transcript

1. How and why to design your teams for modern software systems Matthew Skelton | Skelton Thatcher Consulting @matthewpskelton | skeltonthatcher.com DevOps Lisbon @DevOpsLisbon | DevOps Porto @DevOpsPorto 13 & 14 November 2017, Portugal
2. Today • Conway’s Law (or heuristic) • Cognitive Load for teams • Real-world Team Topologies • Guidelines for team design
3. teamtopologies.com Upcoming book: Team Topologies for effective software systems by Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais
5. About me Matthew Skelton @matthewpskelton Co-founder at Skelton Thatcher Consulting skeltonthatcher.com
6. Books
7. Team Guide series #Operability #BusinessMetrics #Testability #Releasability skeltonthatcher.com/publications
8. Team-first digital transformation 30+ organisations UK, US, DE, India, China skeltonthatcher.com
10. How and why to design your teams for modern software systems
11. Safer, more rapid changes to software systems (Business Agility)
12. TEAM
14. TEAM capabilities appetite & aptitude understanding responsibilities
15. (assumption) the team is stable, slowly changing, and long-lived #NoProjects
16. Conway’s Law (or Conway’s Heuristic)
17. “organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations” – Mel Conway, 1968 http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html
18. “if the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins” – Ruth Malan, 2008 http://traceinthesand.com/blog/2008/02/13/conways-law/
19. “We find strong evidence to support the hypothesis that a product’s architecture tends to mirror the structure of the organization in which it is developed.” – MacCormack et al, 2012 MacCormack, Alan, Carliss Y. Baldwin, and John Rusnak. ‘Exploring the Duality Between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the “Mirroring” Hypothesis’, 1 October 2012. http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=43260.
20. homomorphic force (#Conway  #Yawnoc) HT @allankellynet (same) (shape)
21. Front-end developers Back-end developers
22. ‘Reverse Conway’ Tobbe Gyllebring (@drunkcod)
23. A B A B
25. Design the organisation architecture to produce the right software architecture
26. Cognitive Load for teams
27. Cognitive load the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory (see Sweller, 1988)
28. Cognitive load Intrinsic Extraneous (Irrelevant ) Germane (Relevant)
29. ‘Hacking Your Head’: Jo Pearce See http://www.slideshare.net/JoPearce5/hacking-your-head-managing-information-overload-45-mix @jdpearce
30. We have SCIENCE!
31. Science since 1988 • Driskell et al, 1999 ‘Does Stress Lead to a Loss of Team Perspective?’ Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 3, no. 4 (1999): 291. • Fan et al, 2010 ‘Learning HMM-Based Cognitive Load Models for Supporting Human-Agent Teamwork’. Cognitive Systems Research 11, no. 1 (2010): 108–119. • Ilgen & Hollenbeck, 1993 ‘Effective Team Performance under Stress and Normal Conditions: An Experimental Paradigm, Theory and Data for Studying Team Decision Making in Hierarchical Teams with Distributed Expertise’. DTIC Document, 1993. • Johnston et al, 2002 ‘Application of Cognitive Load Theory to Developing a Measure of Team Decision Efficiency’. DTIC Document, 2002. • Sweller, John, 1994 ‘Cognitive Load Theory, Learning Difficulty, and Instructional Design’. Learning and Instruction 4 (1994): 295–312. • Sweller, John, 1988. ‘Cognitive Load during Problem Solving: Effects on Learning’. Cognitive Science 12, no. 2 (1988): 257–285.
32. “stress impacts team performance … by narrowing or weakening the team-level perspective required for effective team behavior.” – Driskell et al, 1999 Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 1999, Vol. 3, No. 4,291-302
33. (not just ‘pop’ science!)
34. High-performing teams are hugely effective Optimise for the team
35. Match the team responsibility to the cognitive load that the team can handle
36. Real-world Team Topologies
37. DevOpsTopologies.com
38. Development & Testing IT Operations / Web Operations Anti-Type Database / DBA DevOps activity SRE Component Supporting (Tooling / Platform / Build)
39. (Can you spot an important team type that is missing?)
40. Anti-Types
41. Anti-Type A – Separate Silos devopstopologies.com Dev Ops
42. Anti-Type B – Separate DevOps Silo Dev Ops DevOps devopstopologies.com
43. devopstopologies.com Dev Ops DevOps Anti-Type C – “We Don’t Need Ops”
44. Anti-Type D – ‘DevOps’ as another Dev team devopstopologies.com Dev Ops DevOps
45. Anti-Type E – DevOps as new SysAdmin team devopstopologies.com Dev Ops DevOps
46. Anti-Type F – Ops embedded in a Dev Team HT: Matt Franz (@seclectech) devopstopologies.com Dev Ops DevOps
47. Anti-Type G – Dev-DBA gap! devopstopologies.com Dev Ops DBA
48. Types
49. Type 1 – Smooth Collaboration devopstopologies.com Dev Ops DevOps
50. Type 2 – Fully Embedded devopstopologies.com Dev Ops
51. devopstopologies.com Dev Ops DevOps Type 3 – Infrastructure-as-a-Service
52. Type 4 – DevOps-as-a-Service devopstopologies.com Dev Ops DevOps
53. devopstopologies.com Dev Ops DevOps Type 5 – Temporary DevOps Team
54. devopstopologies.com Dev Ops DevOps Type 6 – ‘Facilitating’ DevOps Team
55. Type 7 – SRE Team (Google) SRE HT: @kwdhinde devopstopologies.com Dev Ops DevOps
56. HT: @jascbu devopstopologies.com Dev Ops DevOps Type 8 – ‘Just run my Containers’
57. Type 9 – DB capability in Dev DBA DB Dev devopstopologies.com Dev Ops DevOps
58. Type 10 – DB as a Service DBaaS DB Dev devopstopologies.com Dev Ops DevOps
59. There is no single ‘right’ team topology, but several ‘bad’ topologies for any one organisation
60. Guidelines for team design
61. Collaboration vs X-as-a-Service Collaboration X-as-a-Service devopstopologies.com
62. Collaboration vs X-as-a-Service Collaboration X-as-a-Service devopstopologies.com Rapid discovery No hand-offs Comms overheads? Ownership clarity Less context needed Slower innovation?
63. Supporting & Business Domain Supporting Business Domain devopstopologies.com
64. Inner Topologies Collaboration XaaS Within any group there may be internal collaborations AND other X- as-a-Service (XaaS) relationships devopstopologies.com
65. Team types Component team Platform / ’substrate’ team Supporting / ‘productivity’ team Product/Feature team devopstopologies.com
66. Team configuration devopstopologies.com Platform / ’substrate’ team Product/Feature team
67. Team configuration Component team Platform / ’substrate’ team Product/Feature team devopstopologies.com
68. Team configuration Component team Platform / ’substrate’ team Product/Feature team Supporting / ‘productivity’ team devopstopologies.com
69. Discovery vs. Predictability Team 1 Team 2 Team N Discovery, rapid learning Predictable delivery devopstopologies.com
70. Established platform (PaaS) Predictable delivery devopstopologies.com
71. Evolution of team topologies devopstopologies.com DISCOVER ESTABLISH
72. Evolution of team topologies Team 2 Discover Discover Team N Team 3 Use Use devopstopologies.com Team 1 Establish Establish …
73. Evolve different team topologies for different parts of the organisation at different times to match the team purpose and context
74. Summary
75. Front-end developers Back-end developers A B A B
76. Design the organisation architecture to produce the right software architecture
77. “stress impacts team performance … by narrowing or weakening the team-level perspective required for effective team behavior.” – Driskell et al, 1999 Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 1999, Vol. 3, No. 4,291-302
78. Match the team responsibility to the cognitive load that the team can handle
79. DevOpsTopologies.com
80. There is no single ‘right’ team topology, but several ‘bad’ topologies for any one organisation
81. Team configuration Component team Platform / ’substrate’ team Product/Feature team Supporting / ‘productivity’ team devopstopologies.com
82. Evolution of team topologies Team 2 Discover Discover Team N Team 3 Use Use devopstopologies.com Team 1 Establish Establish …
83. Evolve different team topologies for different parts of the organisation at different times to match the team purpose and context
84. Caution
85. Team topologies alone will not produce effective software systems
86. Also needed: culture, good engineering, sane funding models, clarity of business vision
87. Safer, more rapid changes to software systems (Business Agility)
88. teamtopologies.com Upcoming book: Team Topologies for effective software systems by Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais
90. Team Guide series #Operability #BusinessMetrics #Testability #Releasability skeltonthatcher.com/publications
91. thank you Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais @SkeltonThatcher skeltonthatcher.com