Emily Webber is the author of the book Building Successful Communities of Practice and recently did extensive research (with anthropologist Professor Robin Dunbar) into the size and engagement dynamics of various communities of practice with a particular focus on how the group dynamics change as the group size crosses certain thresholds. The research was published in the academic publication PLOS ONE.

We spoke to Emily about her research and what the implications are for designing and evolving organizations.

We are offering reduced price “Scholarship” training on Team Topologies during June and early July 2020 to people affected by the COVI-19 pandemic: 96€ EUR per session instead of the regular price 300€ EUR per session.

We’re pleased to launch a new online interactive training series covering essential Team Topologies concepts and patterns with training led by the authors of Team Topologies, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais.

The training sessions have been designed for the new remote-first, post-pandemic world. The sessions are 4 hours long (with breaks), making them suitable for people in multiple different timezones to join. The sessions are:

• TT04 - Principles & Practices for Stream-Aligned Teams

• TT05 - Reducing Cognitive Load with Supporting Topologies

• TT06 - Evolving Responsive Organizations

• TT07 - Team Boundaries and Architecture for Fast Flow

Each session covers a different set of Team Topologies ideas and concepts with links between sessions to connect the concepts. Each session is fully independent and valuable by itself, but when taken together as a set of four, the sessions provide a complete coverage of the essential Team Topologies ideas.

The authors of the book Team Topologies - Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais - are pleased to announce new self-paced online training for project managers in partnership with the Project Management Institute (PMI). The course - Team Topologies for Project Managers - helps project managers to understand how to set up technology and business teams to achieve faster flow and faster feedback based on the principles and practices in the acclaimed book Team Topologies. The course takes around 4 hours to complete and comes with a Certification of Completion & 8 PDUs for PMI members.

Deployment pipelines can really help Stream-aligned teams to deliver software changes independently:

1. Deployment pipelines can help to reinforce an independent flow of change for a Stream-aligned team. Don’t forget to enable rapid feedback via telemetry!

2. Define the endpoints external to the team - these represent the “outside world” from team perspective. These external endpoints should be outside or at the domain boundary.

3. There can be huge value in managing your deployment pipeline “as a Service or as a proper product, with product management approaches.

We spoke to Andy Nesling - Product Manager for IoT Cloud at Dyson - about his recent experiences with using agile software delivery approaches to span teams in mobile, cloud, and embedded software systems.

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.

Matthew and Manuel will be presenting and signing their book at several events until end of 2019: DevOps Summit in Amsterdam, DOES US in Las Vegas, SQS-Tag in Frankfurt, Jenkins World in Lisbon, and Seacon in London.

Join to receive a signed free copy of the book!