Conway's Law

A Conway's Law is an Adage about organizations that design systems that are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

• See: Software Interface, Melvin Conway, Modular Programming, Organizational Structure, Datamation.

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References

2017

• (Wikipedia, 2017) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law Retrieved:2017-3-30.
  • Conway's law is an adage named after computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1967; it was first dubbed Conway's law by participants at the 1968 National Symposium on Modular Programming. It states that
    • organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations
      --M. Conway}}

      The law is based on the reasoning that in order for a software module to function, multiple authors must communicate frequently with each other. Therefore, the software interface structure of a system will reflect the social boundaries of the organization(s) that produced it, across which communication is more difficult. Conway's law was intended as a valid sociological observation, although sometimes it's taken in a humorous context.

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