Conway's Law

Conway's Law = designs produced by organizations are necessarily congruent with the communication structure of the organizations producing the design

URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law

Description

From the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law

"Conway's Law is an adage named after computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1968. It concerns the structure of organizations and the corresponding structure of systems (particularly computer software) designed by those organizations. In various versions, Conway's Law states:

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler. Or more concisely:

Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it. Despite jocular usage and jocular derivative "laws," Conway's law was not intended as a joke or a Zen koan, but as a valid sociological observation. It is a consequence of the fact that two software modules A and B cannot interface correctly with each other unless the designer and implementer of A communicates with the designer and implementer of B. Thus the interface structure of a software system necessarily will show a congruence with the social structure of the organization that produced it."