A stream is the continuous flow of work aligned to a business domain or organizational capability. A stream requires clear goals and responsibilities so that multiple teams can coexist, each with their own flow of work.
A stream-aligned team is a team that works on a single stream of valuable work, such as a product or service, a set of features, or a user persona. Such teams typically have complete ownership over the work they do; this means that they do not require hand-offs from other teams to perform any part of their work.
A stream-aligned team, working on the full spectrum of delivery, is positioned to respond quickly to feedback from customers and to monitor their software in production. They are the primary team type in an organization, and other types of fundamental team topologies exist to support them.
Generally, stream-aligned teams require capabilities to progress work from its initial exploration stages to production. These capabilities include:
- Application security
- Commercial and operational viability analysis
- Design and architecture
- Development and coding
- Infrastructure and operability
- Metrics and monitoring
- Product management and ownership
- Testing and quality assurance
- User experience (UX)
Expected Behaviors
- A stream-aligned team attempts to deliver a steady stream of features.
- Stream-aligned teams are capable of quickly adapting to changes as they arise.
- A stream-aligned team is experimental and adaptable, allowing it to learn from its mistakes as it goes.
- A stream-aligned team has minimal to no hand-offs of work to other teams.
- Stream-aligned teams are evaluated on the sustainable flow of change they produce, as well as some supporting technical and team-health metrics.
- A stream-aligned team should have time and space to address code quality changes to ensure that changing the code remains safe and easy.
- A stream-aligned team regularly reaches out to the supporting fundamental-topologies teams (complicated subsystem, enabling, and platform).
- A stream-aligned team members feel they are on the path to achieving “autonomy, mastery and purpose.”
Reference
- Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton
