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Simo Roikonen
Simo Roikonen

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Your organization is perfectly designed to produce the results it gets

high cohesion and low coupling

Leaders should ensure dev teams maintain high cohesion and low coupling to improve quality and increase overall productivity.

Architects should ensure components maintain high cohesion and low coupling to enhance system maintainability, scalability and reliability.

WHY should you foster high cohesion and low coupling in teams?
🎯 Better Focus: Teams with clear, unified goals (high cohesion) are more productive and effective.
💪 Robust Code: Expertise and focus lead to higher quality, more reliable software, and easier testing.
🤝 Fosters Shared Ownership: Team members are familiar with the codebase and can seamlessly continue work if someone leaves.
🌐 Adaptability: Independent, low-coupled teams can respond quickly to new opportunities and challenges.
🔄 Flexibility: Reduced interdependencies allow for easy reconfiguration to meet new priorities.
💡 Innovation: Autonomy via low coupling fosters creativity and continuous improvement.

If you think about it, your organization is perfectly designed to produce the results it gets. So, could it be that by aligning teams and components, both having high cohesion and low coupling, you can achieve higher quality, better maintainability and faster development velocity? 🤔

Leaders can't do this alone, architects can't do this alone.

Involving architects in organizational design helps to achieve this. This way, leaders can ensure that both the team structure and the software architecture align with the principles of high cohesion and low coupling, driving value creation, speed and agility. 🚀

What strategies, tools, or methods have you found effective in fostering high cohesion and low coupling in your teams?

My two cents:
1️⃣ Domain-Driven Design (DDD): Utilizing DDD principles to structure teams around business domains. This ensures that teams have a deep understanding of the domain they are working in, which enhances cohesion and allows for more effective problem-solving and decision-making.
2️⃣ Team Topologies: Applying the Team Topologies framework to define clear team boundaries and interaction patterns. This helps in designing teams that are aligned with the software architecture and business needs, promoting low coupling and high cohesion.

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