Software Design X-Rays

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

Blaise Pascal

Chapter 7Beyond Conway’s Law

In Part I we saw that a software project often mistakes organizational problems for technical issues, and treats the symptoms instead of the root cause. This misdirection happens because the organization that builds the system is invisible in our code. We can’t tell from the code alone if a piece of code is a productivity bottleneck for five different teams. In this chapter we close this knowledge gap as we use version-control data to measure team efficiency and detect parts of the code with excess coordination needs.

This means we’ll be able to measure aspects of software development that we haven’t been able to measure ...