Conway’s Law:
‘For any organization that builds systems, the systems they produce reflect the communication structures of that organization.’
If your organization is inefficient and disjointed, or dictatorial and myopic, it shows in your products.
Conway’s Law: ‘For any organization that builds systems, the systems they produce reflect the communication structures of that organization.’ If your organization is inefficient and disjointed, or dictatorial and myopic, it shows in your products.
Conway’s Law is a celebrated truism in software development: technical systems tend to resemble the communication structures of the organizations that create them.
Nathan Schneider • Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life
Brie Wolfson added
Conway’s Law doesn’t leave anyone guessing about how to make organizational communication structures work for the greater good. As the conclusion of Conway’s paper states: We have found a criterion for the structuring of design organizations: a design effort should be organized according to the need for communication.
Vaughn Vernon • Strategic Monoliths and Microservices: Driving Innovation Using Purposeful Architecture (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Vernon))
"Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure."–Marvin Conway
Wikipedia • Conway's law
Brie Wolfson and added
There’s this cool idea in software that you “ship your org chart” called Conway’s law:
“Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations”
I’d offer a similar law for investors: “you… Show more
sari added
and I’d offer a similar law for companies - your company mimics the incentives of its investors.
A corollary of Conway’s Law is that an organization’s structures themselves can be constrained by the architectures that they designed many years earlier. And without intentional action, it’s a Catch-22. “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking we used when we created them,” Einstein said. An example of this antipattern is a mi
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