Matthew Skelton > Quotes

“When cognitive load isn’t considered, teams are spread thin trying to cover an excessive amount of responsibilities and domains. Such a team lacks bandwidth to pursue mastery of their trade and struggles with the costs of switching contexts.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“To avoid the too-common trap of building a platform disconnected from the needs of teams, it is essential to ensure that the platform teams have a focus on user experience (UX) and particularly developer experience (DevEx).”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“The purpose of a platform team is to enable stream-aligned teams to deliver work with substantial autonomy. The stream-aligned team maintains full ownership of building, running, and fixing their application in production. The platform team provides internal services to reduce the cognitive load that would be required from stream-aligned teams to develop these underlying services.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“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.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“thinking of software architecture as a standalone concept that can be designed in isolation and then implemented by any group of teams is fundamentally wrong.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“The most important part of the platform is that it is built for developers.”21”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Fast flow requires restricting communication between teams. Team collaboration is important for gray areas of development, where discovery and expertise is needed to make progress. But in areas where execution prevails—not discovery—communication becomes an unnecessary overhead.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“As Allan Kelly says, “software developers love building platforms and, without strong product management input, will create a bigger platform than needed.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“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 splitting of software is particularly useful with monolithic software.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Broadly speaking, for effective delivery and operations of modern software systems, organizations should attempt to minimize intrinsic cognitive load (through training, good choice of technologies, hiring, pair programming, etc.) and eliminate extraneous cognitive load altogether (boring or superfluous tasks or commands that add little value to retain in the working memory and can often be automated away), leaving more space for germane cognitive load (which is where the “value add” thinking lies).”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Mike Cohn, one of the originators of the Scrum product-development approach, asks these questions to assess the health of inter-team communication within an organization: “Does the structure minimize the number of communication paths between teams? . . . Does the structure encourage teams to communicate who wouldn’t otherwise do so?15”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

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― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“The key takeaway here is that thinking of software architecture as a standalone concept that can be designed in isolation and then implemented by any group of teams is fundamentally wrong.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“This quote from Ruth Malan provides what could be seen as the modern version of Conway’s law: “If the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Forming: assembling for the first time Storming: working through initial differences in personality and ways of working Norming: evolving standard ways of working together Performing: reaching a state of high effectiveness”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Organization design and software design are, in practice, two sides of the same coin,”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Does the structure minimize the number of communication paths between teams? . . . Does the structure encourage teams to communicate who wouldn’t otherwise do so?”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Domains help us think across the board and use common heuristics.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“the ratio of stream-aligned teams to other kinds of teams should be between about 6:1 and 9:1.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Ideally, teams should be long lived and autonomous, with engaged team members. However, teams don’t live in isolation. They need to understand how and when to interact with each other. And these team interactions need to evolve over time to support the distinct phases of discovery and execution that products and technology go through during their lifetimes. In short, organizations not only need to strive for autonomous teams, they also need to continuously think about and evolve themselves in order to deliver value quickly to customers.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Miguel Antunes, R&D Principle Software Engineer at OutSystems, a low-code platform vendor, relayed an example of this very challenge. Their Engineering Productivity team at OutSystems was five years old. The team’s mission was to help product teams run their builds efficiently, maintain infrastructure, and improve test execution. The team kept growing and took on extra responsibilities around continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and infrastructure automation.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“In other words, there needs to be a split between the responsibility of designing the cloud infrastructure process (by the cloud team) and the actual provisioning and updates to application resources (by the product teams).”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“four fundamental team topologies: ​•​Stream-aligned team ​•​Enabling team ​•​Complicated-subsystem team ​•​Platform team”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Change the team working environment to help teams succeed.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Work information: what the team is working on now, what’s coming next, and overall priorities in the short to medium term”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“When organizations do not explicitly think about team structures and patterns of interaction, they encounter unexpected difficulties building and running software systems.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Act and operate as an effective team? ​•​Own part of the software effectively? ​•​Focus on meeting the needs of users? ​•​Reduce unnecessary cognitive load? ​•​Consume and provide software and information to other teams?”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“In their 2012 paper, “A Taxonomy of Dependencies in Agile Software Development,” Diane Strode and Sid Huff propose three different categories of dependency: knowledge, task, and resource dependencies.14 Such a taxonomy can help pinpoint dependencies between teams and the potential constraints to the flow of work ahead of time.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins.”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

“Eyes On, Hands Off”
― Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow