We spoke to Darren Murph - Head of Remote at GitLab - about the opportunities and challenges presented by remote working for organizations building software-based systems and services. We were keen to get his insights into team-centric approaches to remote work.

During the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2019 in Las Vegas, the authors of the “Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow” book - Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais were interviewed by SolutionIQ’s Stas Zvinyatskovsky for the Agile Amped Podcast.

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.

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.