Socio-Technical Evolution: Growing an Architecture and Its Organization for Fast Flow

My Software Architecture Gathering 2025 presentation
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Achieving fast flow—the rapid and reliable delivery of change—requires picking the right socio-technical architecture: a combination of software architecture and organizational structure suited to your context. To paraphrase Einstein, it should be as simple as possible but no simpler. Unfortunately, many enterprises fall into the trap of over-engineering their architecture while simultaneously misaligning their teams, resulting in unnecessary complexity and friction that slows delivery.

In this presentation, I describe a strategy for starting with the simplest possible socio-technical architecture for your context and then incrementally evolving it to support fast flow. You will learn about the building blocks of socio-technical architecture. I explain how organizational structures, like architectural elements, exist to solve specific problems and must evolve as those problems change. You will learn to recognize the signals that indicate when your socio-technical architecture needs to change—and how to transform it accordingly.

Transcript

1. Socio-technical evolution: growing an architecture and its organization for fast fl ow Chris Richardson Founder of Eventuate.io Founder of the original CloudFoundry.com Author of POJOs in Action and Microservices Patterns chris@chrisrichardson.net http://adopt.microservices.io https://www.linkedin.com/in/pojos Copyright © 2025. Chris Richardson Consulting, Inc. All rights reserved
2. Presentation goal How to incrementally grow an application and its development organization
3. About Chris http://adopt.microservices.io
4. About Chris https://chrisrichardson.net/
5. Microservices Patterns, 2nd edition https://microservices.io/post/architecture/2025/06/26/announcing-meap-microservices-patterns-2nd-edition.html
6. Agenda Introduction to socio-technical architecture De fi ning a socio-technical architecture Growing a socio-technical architecture
7. Socio-technical architecture : fl ow
8. Fast fl ow for business succe$$ in today’s turbulent (VUCA) world Development Production Continuous stream of small changes, many times a day Continuous feedback and learning Users IT
9. Enables Enables Process: Principles and practices for fast fl ow Organization: Organizational patterns and principles for fast fl ow Fast fl ow success triangle Fast fl ow architecture: (at scale) A socio-technical architecture for fast fl ow
10. Fast fl ow socio-technical architecture: organization
11. Team topologies: organizational patterns and principles for fast fl ow
12. Cognitive overload: an obstacle to fast fl ow Sources: Inherent complexity Accidental complexity Consequences: Reduces team performance Impacts mental health: stress, burnout. DevEx Work environment than minimizes interruptions, meaningful work, … Minimize - simplify environment, automate, good documentation, … Fast feedback from colleagues, tools, deployment pipeline, production, users, … Feedback Flow Cognitive load Great https://premium.microservices.io/microservices-rules-4-provide-a-great-developer-experience/
13. Fast fl ow socio-technical architecture: architecture
14. Architecture is multi-dimensional
15. Architectural requirements for fast fl ow
16. Cognitive alignment - ownership
17. Independent teams require loose design-time coupling
18. Independent teams must be able to deploy without coordination and receive prompt feedback
19. Agenda Introduction to socio-technical architecture De fi ning a socio-technical architecture Growing a socio-technical architecture
20. Decisions: architecture Monolith vs. Microservices
21. Decisions: organizations Understaf fi ng => slow delivery insuf fi cient execution capacity insuf fi cient cognitive capacity Overstaf fi ng => slow delivery Excessive coordination overhead
22. https://quotesgram.com/einstein-quotes-on-simplicity/
23. Simplest possible socio-technical architecture: buy
24. Simplest possible socio-technical architecture: build Too sim ple for m ost applications (Probably)
25. Simplest possible socio-technical architecture: practical
26. Growing workload + cognitive load of existing system => stresses a socio-technical architecture
27. Socio-technical friction: obstacles to fast fl ow
28. Architecture as a set of design decisions https://microservices.io/post/architecture/2023/10/16/about-a-service-exists-to-solve-problems.html
29. Grow the socio-technical architecture one design decision at a time
30. Organization and architecture must often evolve together to maintain fast fl ow
31. Agenda Introduction to socio-technical architecture De fi ning a socio-technical architecture Growing a socio-technical architecture
32. Socio-technical transformations to reduce friction
33. Add team member Expands execution capacity (person- hours) Adds cognitive capacity Adds missing skills and capabilities
34. Split team “socio-technical mitosis”
35. When to split a team: Team size > 15 Coordination overhead within a team ∝ to n × (n – 1)/2 (N = team size), e.g. Architecture advice process involves more people Loss of shared understanding of change Loss of psychological safety …
36. When to split a team: problem domain exceeds cognitive capacity of an individual Team members struggle to reason about end-to-end business fl ows Meetings revolve around clarifying business rules, not implementing them The same concepts get re-explained differently by different people Decisions slow because domain knowledge is fragmented
37. When to split a team: software has grown too large Cognitive overload - nobody has a broad understanding of the code base It doesn’t fi t in a developer’s brain Members complain about lack of documentation Team members specialize on different parts of the code base - becomes a team of teams
38. Realign with fl ow
39. Extract service…
40. … Extract service
41. Adding a platform group
42. Example: microservices platforms https://microservices.io/post/architecture/2025/05/06/microservices-platforms-team-topologies-patterns.html
43. Adding an enabling team
44. Summary: fast fl ow socio-technical architecture
45. Summary: start with simplest socio-technical architecture and incrementally evolve to maintain fast fl ow
46. Summary: growth requires loose design-time coupling
47. Summary: transform to eliminate friction
48. chris@chrisrichardson.net Questions? http://adopt.microservices.io https://www.linkedin.com/in/pojos