Platform Teams: An Organizational Structure for Continuous Delivery

Abstract

Software-producing organizations are seeking to release faster and more efficiently new versions of their products to their customers to remain competitive in the fierce software market. Continuous delivery practices arise as a potential solution since every commit to the repository could result in a production-candidate version of a product, accelerating time to market, and improving customer satisfaction. In this work, we employed Grounded Theory to investigate how organizations pursuing continuous delivery should organize their development and operations teams. We collected data from 27 IT professionals. After a careful analysis, we started the elaboration of a taxonomy with four patterns of organizational structures: (1) siloed departments, (2) classical DevOps, (3) cross-functional teams, and (4) platform teams. We observed that the platform team structure is the most distinctive classification of our taxonomy, and it has promising results regarding delivery performance. Some relevant aspects we found out about platform teams include: infrastructure specialists need coding skills; product teams have to operate their business services; and much of the non-functional concerns are handled by the platform, alleviating product teams.