Software Design X-Rays

Social Groups: The Flip Side to Conway’s Law

So far you’ve probably gotten the impression that if we just manage to align our operational boundaries with a system’s architecture, we’re fine. Conway’s law is a great observation from the dawn of software development that has received renewed interest over the past few years, mostly as a way to sell the idea of microservices. But from a psychological perspective Conway’s law is an oversimplification. Team work is much more multifaceted. The law also involves a trade-off: we minimize communication needs between teams, but that win comes with costs and risks that are rarely discussed in a software setting. Let’s look at an example using the knowledge map in the following figure.

From the perspective ...