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.

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.

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.