Playing Tetris with Cognitive Load
summary
Frames team cognitive load as a Tetris board and claims organizations can shrink distracting pieces by using four team types and three interaction modes rather than vague DevOps edicts. It prescribes stream-aligned teams owning a service, platform as self-service to hide infra complexity, small enabling teams to teach skills, and rare complicated subsystem teams for PhD-level work. Practical steps: run a team cognitive load assessment, map service size to team capacity, track blocking dependencies, avoid dropping heavyweight tools like Kubernetes on teams without platform and mentoring.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (17)
- 0:00Intro
- 3:24building the product right
- 4:59building the right product
- 8:04The total amount of mental
- 9:11Intrinsic How are classes Extraneous defined in Germane
- 10:35Intrinsic (skills) Extraneous (mechanism) Germane (domain focus)
- 14:26Limit the size of software services/products to the cognitive load that the team can handle.
- 16:27topology the way in which constituent parts are interrelated or arranged
- 18:08We expect most teams to be (value) stream-aligned with end-to-end ownership (if we want fast flow)
- 19:20Enabling teams reduce the learning curve for new team capabilities by teaching and mentoring
- 20:51Platform teams provide services that enable stream-aligned teams to deliver work with substantial autonomy
- 21:06A digital platform is a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge and support which are arranged as a compelling internal product.
- 24:024 fundamental topologies I Complicated subsystem team
- 24:16Complicated subsystem teams build and evolve part of a system which requires specialized, PhD type of knowledge
- 26:08Team Interaction Modes F Collaboration: 2 teams working together X-as-a-Service: 1 provides, 1 consumes Facilitating: 1 team helps another
- 28:45When used with care, these are the only four fundamental topologies and team interaction modes needed to build and run modern software systems.
- 29:38Taming Cognitive Load Explicit cognitive load Team-sized software Adequate team topologies
related talks
51mTeam Cognitive Load as a metric to measure Platform impact
33mMonoliths vs Microservices is Missing the Point—Start with Team Cognitive Load
18mA customer-focussed realignment based on cognitive load at Mimecast
32mThe Cognitive Load Crisis: How Modern Web Systems Burn Out Teams
37mWhat to Think About, if You're Thinking About Building a Team?
46mWhy is this so hard: The cognitive and coordinative work of software development
40mEnabling teams for happier and more productive engineers
30mThe Art of Team Design