Locality

09 Feb 2026

In The Claes Test, I ask a critical question about collaboration: Do boundaries get out of the way so teams can solve problems together? (Question 7).

In many organisations, this box is left unticked. Progress depends on hand-offs, approvals and waiting for other teams, and what is described as “collaboration” often turns into a series of blockers. Autonomy is confused with working in isolation.

To move this from a blank to a tick, we need to understand the concept of Locality.

The Standardisation Paradox

A common pushback to Locality is the fear of chaos. If every team has total Locality, won’t they all pick different databases, different auth providers, and different UI buttons? Wouldn’t that hurt the customer experience?.

This is where we must distinguish between Locality and Isolation. Locality isn’t silofication; it is about having the authority, capability, and expertise to satisfy customer needs without being blocked by external dependencies.

I like to use an IKEA analogy here: if you are installing a kitchen, you don’t call a specialist to drill every single hole. You have the tools and the pre-drilled boards to do it yourself. That is Locality. The platform (IKEA) provides the “FIXA” toolset and the pre-measured units (the standards), but you maintain the authority to hang the cabinet yourself.

1. Locality of Authority vs. Locality of Toil

A common friction point is the belief that a team must build its own infrastructure from scratch to be “autonomous”. That isn’t Locality; that’s toil.

True Locality means decision-making stays with the team. A platform engineering team provides “guided paths”: automated, self-service workflows that amplify Locality by removing low-value plumbing work.

This maps directly to Question 11 (CI/CD). Locality allows changes to be deployed safely and frequently without waiting for manual hand-offs from an external operations or release team.

2. Developer Independence as the Metric

Locality exists when a team can own the full application lifecycle without relying on another team to carry out essential work.

If a team has to wait for a central function to provision a database or approve a firewall rule, Locality is broken. The boundary has become a blockade.

In a platform-enabled environment, the platform team treats developers as customers, building self-service products that keep teams in the driver’s seat. The platform should also provide Decision Support: as not every team is equally strong at engineering and architecture. This is where standardisation helps: the platform provides a standardied, secure, and performant X (compute, storage, database, monitoring, etc) configuration by default. It helps teams move faster by making “expensive mistakes” harder to commit.

3. Locality through Decoupling

You cannot achieve Locality in a “distributed monolith” where every minor change requires a coordination meeting across multiple teams. Locality is technically supported by a loosely coupled architecture.

This ensures the team closest to the service has everything they need: logs, metrics and diagnostics to identify and resolve issues independently (Question 9: Production Readiness). If you have to ask another team to access your own production data, you don’t have Locality.

Fixing the Environment

As I note in the Claes Test, behaviour is a function of both the person and their environment: (\(B = f(P, E)\)).

The question “boundaries don’t block progress” isn’t about collaborating harder; it’s about fixing the environment.

By building platforms that enable Locality, we remove the structural friction that prevents teams from being truly autonomous and collaborative.

Locality is about ownership. Platform engineering is what makes that ownership scalable.

Interestingly, Locality is the first of the Five Ideals of DevOps. It is not a “nice to have”; it is the structural foundation that enables flow, continuous improvement, psychological safety and real customer focus. The Claes Test is, in many ways, a practical way of measuring whether Locality actually exists inside an organisation.

If boundaries are blocking progress in your organisation, the Claes Test can help you pinpoint where Locality is breaking down.

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