Your Code as a Crime Scene, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

Spot Conway’s Law in Your Code

Brooks wasn’t the first to point out the link between organization and software design. A decade earlier, Melvin Conway published his classic paper that included the thesis we now recognize as Conway’s Law (see How do committees invent? [Con68]):

Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.

Conway’s Law has received a lot of attention over the years, so let’s keep this brief. Basically, you can interpret Conway’s Law in two ways. First, you can interpret it in the cynical (and fun) way, as in the The Jargon File:^[76] “If you have four groups working on a ...