Open Agile Architecture(tm) - a Standard of the Open Group by Group The Open;

Author:Group, The Open;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Van Haren Publishing
Published: 2020-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

12.3. Team Taxonomy

Agile teams can be classified into three categories: stream-aligned, platform, and competency teams.

12.3.1. Stream-Aligned Teams

Stream-aligned teams make a functioning whole because they are responsible for all the activities necessary to deliver valuable streams of work. They are closer to external or internal customers because they deliver value to them. Stream-aligned teams usually interact with customers and are able to quickly integrate their feedback.

A great number of streams exist in an Agile at scale organization. The intentional architecture defines a modular decomposition of the architecture at all levels of the enterprise. Stream-aligned teams are assigned the responsibility of segments of the enterprise at different levels of granularity. For example, a “team of teams” can be entrusted the responsibility of lending products that target small businesses. At a lower level of granularity, a small “two-pizzas” team can be entrusted with the responsibility of the customer appointment management feature.

When assigning responsibilities to a team, it is critical to ensure the resulting cognitive load will not be too high [Skelton 2019]. When the capacity of a team is spread too thin over a scope that is too large, it affects team morale and work quality. Taking cognitive load into consideration when defining the scope of Agile teams is critical.

Another consideration is the “Dunbar number”, which is a limit to the number of people with whom a person can maintain stable social relationships. Robin Dunbar found a correlation between a primate’s brain size and the average social group size. Extrapolating this result to humans, the Dunbar number estimates that the size of a stable and cohesive human group should not exceed 150 to 200 people.

When the architecture of a system and the structure of the organization that is responsible for that system are at odds, the likelihood that the structure of the organization will win is high. This is why the Inverse Conway Maneuver recommends shaping the organization so that communication lines mirror intentional architecture boundaries.

This document recommends the decomposition of the enterprise into segments that are:

• Orthogonal, to prevent teams from working on the same things

• Loosely-coupled, to minimize inter-team dependencies

Figure 24 summarizes the ideas developed in this section.

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