Team Topologies, Cognitive Load & Complex Systems

The "Engineering Room" is a monthly series of conversations with people who are influential in the software industry. In this episode Dave Farley, author of "Continuous Delivery", "Modern Software Engineering" and others, talks to Matthew Skelton co-author of one of the most significant software books of the last 10 years - “Team Topologies”, about the ingredients for long-term, viable, sustainable and understandable software development. Matthew Skelton is co-author of "Team Topologies: organizing business and technology teams for fast flow". He is Head of Consulting at Conflux and specialises in Continuous Delivery, operability, and organisation dynamics for modern software systems. In this conversation with Dave, he talks about the ecosystem necessary to build and nurture software, and the wide range of topics that impact on the effectiveness, and performance of development teams. The approach that his book "Team Topologies" describes is to use team structure as a tool, guided by the idea of managing the cognitive load of the team. This talk ranges from how to deal with the complex adaptive system that we inhabit when undertaking software development, to the structure of software development being more like an ant colony than an organised, predictable hierarchy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIcp9zDs4EI