We recently talked with Scott Prugh, Chief Architect & SVP Software Engineering at CSG, about some of the patterns and anti-patterns in the DevOps Topologies online catalog (predecessor of the Team Topologies book). We explore how the topologies have helped shape team structures and interactions at CSG.

I recently joined Mike Kavis of Deloitte on his OnCloud podcast to talk about team communication for effective software delivery. We covered the original DevOps Topologies patterns and how these have been used in industry, and then talked about what’s in the book Team Topologies: well-defined team types, what we mean by a modern platform, team interaction modes, clear responsibility boundaries, DevEx, and using difficulties in team interactions as ‘signals’ to the organization that something is missing or misplaced. We also talked about moving beyond the Spotify model - success in software delivery is not just about team structures but about how teams interact and what kind of relationships they create, sustain, and evolve.

The book Team Topologies has been 5 or 6 years in the making. How did we (Manuel and I) come to write to book and why?

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In our travels around the world helping organizations with software delivery practices, we noticed that organizations needed guidance on how to evolve team interactions. We also saw that in many organizations the boundaries between teams are very unclear: people were asking “why are we spending so much time working with that other team?” or “why is this service so difficult to use?” - very often there was little clarity about the purpose and duration of team-to-team interactions.

We recently talked with Francesco Vivoli, Engineering Director at B2B tech company The Workshop, after an intriguing tweet from him on moving a 90 people “conglomerate” into 13 autonomous teams.