law coined by Mel Conway that states that system design will copy the communication structures of the organization which designs it.
— Team Topologies, First Edition (as “Conway’s law”)
Conway's Law
1 of our books and 2 talks define this term — and their definitions are worth reading side by side.
Conway's Law is simply that the design of a system will match the communication patterns within an organization
— Dave Thompson · Intentional Architecture in Agile Organizations, San Francisco 2017 · at 5:06
Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations
— Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Nigel Kersten · DevOps: The Key to High Performance (What the Data Says), London 2017 · at 21:42
See also application monolith · application programming interface (API) · bounded context · domain complexity · emergent architecture · joined-at-the-database monolith
Filed under Architecture & Systems