Conway’s Law

“Organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structures.”

This rule comes from a 1968 paper by Melvin Conway about “How Do Committees Invent?”

Basically, look at your current organizational structure. Your product’s architecture will likely follow that structure closely.

For example, if you have a firmware team, a host library team, and a host application team, then your product’s software architecture will mirror that. You’ll have a firmware module, a host library, and a host application.

You’re probably saying, “Duh, that’s what we want.”

And that might be true.

However, what about test and verification? Conway’s Law says that if you also sprinkle your test team across the organization, then you’ll end with one platform that tests firmware, another that tests the host library, and a third that tests the host application.

In a small org, that might be ok. In a large and complex org, that’s probably not what you want.

So you can reverse engineer Conway’s Law.

Design your organization to match your product’s intended structure.