Conway's law

Structural debt presents as five-minute debates happening 50 times a week, across a team of 12 engineers, sustained over three years.

Conway's Law.

Why this is structurally inevitable.

To understand why code-based structures drift into disarray, look at the humans building them.

If an engineering organization consists of three separate teams, front-end, back-end, and DBA, Conway's Law dictates they will build a three-tier architecture, presentation, API, and database layers.

Not because an architect designed it, but because that is how the humans talk to each other.

If you instead reorganize those same engineers into cross-functional squads, checkout, payments, and inventory, the codebase splits into three domain services.

I am coming from academy also, and I would not consider them laws, but they are already called laws.

It's like Conway's law, Brooks' law.

So someone already called them laws.

So I just try to use the same wording.

Then we'll discuss a few later.

Yeah.

What is law in my opinion? Of course, let's say Conway's law.

I think it's a great example that everyone needs to know about that organization design systems that mirror their own communication structure.

I think the research was done at MIT and Harvard.

But there's this concept called Conway's Law.

And Conway's Law is fairly simple.

It says that once you implement digital systems, your digital infrastructure has to match your – architecture has to match your communication architecture.

Or one of the things is going to break, and you're going to have problems.

I think that motivates change.

There's an interesting law, it's called Conway's Law, developed by a software engineer back in the '60s, who noted that a lot of tech products and software seemed to reflect the organizational structure of the company that produced it.

So if a software had three modules in it, there's a good chance that that organization had three different divisions who were working on different parts of that.

I think that there is so much opportunity for improving business outcomes by reducing this coordination tax.

Number [clears throat] page 28, How Do Committees Invent?-

[gasps] Conway's Law

... by Melvin E. Conway.

That is right, Teej.

It is the-

Yes

... original publication of Conway's Law.

Whoa.

And this reminds me of what you were saying earlier about people problems, essentially.

And, you know, the organization is a big factor here because I guess the way legacy systems often end up, you know, Conway's Law and the like is based around team structures and, you know, internal dynamics.

I guess to be successful a project like this, needs to be tackling those as well.

Exactly.

There are only people problems.

And seeing how that manifests with Conway's Law and various other things, like very much, always has interesting detail, right? Lots of chaos theory and things to contribute to that.

Yep.

Yeah, it's just reminded me of there was a little tweet thread I was on yesterday about like unknown unknowns.

And this actually touches on a deeper concept in the text regarding Agile as organizational design.

There was a famous axiom called Conway's Law.

Let's dive into that because the text mentions it, but I really want to understand the mechanics.

Conway's Law states that organizations inevitably design systems that mirror their own internal communication structures.

Wait, really? So the org chart dictates the product?

Yes.