Somehow, I hadn’t come across Conway’s Law until today, despite the fact that Melvin Conway came up with it when I was still wearing nappies.
Conway’s Law states that:
Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
Or, as it is often more briefly stated,
Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.
If you’ve worked on software of any scale, you will know how true this is! Another nice form is:
If you have four groups working on a compiler, you’ll get a 4-pass compiler.
Brilliant stuff. More information on Conway’s Law and some of its corollaries here.
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