• Stars
    star
    105
  • Rank 328,196 (Top 7 %)
  • Language
  • License
    Creative Commons ...
  • Created almost 5 years ago
  • Updated over 3 years ago

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Be the first to send feedback to the community and the maintainers!

Repository Details

Suggested tools and approaches to track team dependencies in an organization

Team Dependencies Tracking

Suggested tools and approaches to track team dependencies in an organization. Based on some of the ideas in the book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton @matthewskelton and Manuel Pais @manupaisable.

See teamtopologies.com for more details about Team Topolologies.

Copyright Β© 2018-2020 Team Topologies - Licenced under CC BY-SA 4.0 CC BY-SA 4.0

Overview

All teams are part of a socio-technical system, and therefore will depend on other teams at some point in time, to a greater or lesser extent. Even if following the ideas in Team Topologies around increased or full ownership of end-to-end services, this is hardly ever 100% true.

That means we should be tracking dependencies between teams now and over time. Some dependencies might be fine today but in a few months from now they start slowing down the dependant team too much and we need to address it.

While ideally we might want to remove all dependencies, in practice we should identify which ones are problematic and should be removed, and which ones are "under control", for now at least. A problematic dependency introduces significant delays and/or are too unpredictability and/or increased work in progress (WIP) for the dependent team, slowing them down considerably.

How to use

Spotify dependency tracker

The article that described what became known as the "Spotify Model" (Oct 2012) also explained how Spotify tracked dependencies between teams over time with a simple spreadsheet. They would ask all their squads which other squads they depended on, and to what extent those dependencies were blocking or slowing them down.

They would then address the the blocking and cross-tribe dependencies (namely through reorganization, architectural changes or technical solutions), while continuing to monitor the remaining ones:

Screenshot of the Spotify team dependency tracker - Source: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf (page 6) [Source: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf (page 6)]

Below is a table strongly inspired in the team dependencies tracker spreadsheet from Spotify:

Team name/focus Depends on Team Type (blocking/slowing/ok) Cross-streams (Yes/No) Short description of dependency (artifacts, approvals, other)
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

With a simple spreadsheet you can graph the evolution of the different dependencies over time and get early feedback on potential problems ahead.

Other team dependency tools

More Repositories

1

Team-API-template

A template for defining a Team API - as explained in the Team Topologies book
648
star
2

Team-Cognitive-Load-Assessment

A template for a team cognitive load assessment. Based on some of the ideas in the book _Team Topologies_ by Matthew Skelton [@matthewskelton](https://github.com/matthewskelton) and Manuel Pais [@manupaisable](https://github.com/manupaisable).
387
star
3

Team-Shape-Templates

Templates for popular drawing and diagramming tools to represent the team types and team interaction modes in Team Topologies
382
star
4

Independent-Service-Heuristics

The Independent Service Heuristics (ISH) are rules-of-thumb (clues) for identifying candidate value streams and domain boundaries by seeing if they could be run as a separate SaaS/cloud product.
326
star
5

Team-Topologies-Community-Materials

A list of materials relating to Team Topologies (articles, tools, canvases, etc.) generated by the community.
Ruby
182
star
6

Thinnest-Viable-Platform-examples

Examples of a Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP) as defined in the book Team Topologies
71
star
7

Thin-Platform-template

A simple template for a wiki page for a TVP (thinnest viable platform) - as explained in the Team Topologies book
62
star
8

Team-Topologies-Book-References

References from the Team Topologies book in formats suitable for research tools
TeX
28
star
9

Trust-Boundaries-template

A template to help assess the size of groups in an organization in relation to Dunbar number trust boundaries
27
star
10

miro-team-topologies

Team Topologies web plugin for Miro.com
TypeScript
24
star
11

TeamAPI-As-Code

The TeamAPI specification allows you to create machine-readable definitions of your team APIs.
23
star
12

Team-Topologies-Glossary-Translations

Glossary from the Team Topologies book translated to different languages
11
star
13

Online-Space-Assessment

Suggested tools and approaches to assess the trust dynamics of online spaces (especially chat tools) in an organization
10
star
14

Team-Autonomy-Metrics

Some suggestions for how to gauge team autonomy based on principles from Team Topologies
9
star