Melvin Conway

So I like to talk about this thing called Conway's Law a lot.

Mel Conway was a software developer.

His idea doesn't only apply to software.

I think it'll be recognizable.

Oh, Conway's Law is the secret ruling force of all software engineering.

Melvin Conway observed that organizations are constrained to produce designs which are exact copies of the communication structures of those organizations.

Wait, does that literally mean if an organization has a front-end department and a back-end database department that absolutely loathe each other and refuse to collaborate-

Yes

And in those cases, there's always this alarm bell that goes off.

And I think about Conway's law, you know, and originally- What's that? Melvin Conway in the late 60s wrote a

book.

I love how you say those things like everybody knows them, by the way.

We'll just get into it.

Conway's Law, which is the work reveals how we communicate, and it's attributed to Melvin Conway, who was an American computer scientist.

Conway's Law states that organizations designing systems produce designs that reflect their communication structures.

Okay.

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Melvin Conway, 1968.

You're seeing this at all levels in the executive teams and so on.

So tell us a little bit about how that's appearing now.