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Conway's Law


Orunmila

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Melvin Conway quipped the phrase back in 1967 that "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

Over the decades this old adage has proven to be quite accurate and this has become known as "Conway's Law". Researchers from MIT and Harvard have since shown that there is strong evidence for this correllation, they called it the "The Mirroring Hypothesis". 

When you read "The mythical man month" by Fred Brooks we see that we already knew back in the seventies that there is no silver bullet when it comes to Software Engineering, and that the reason for this is essentially the complexity of software and how we deal with it. It turns out that adding more people to a software project increases the number of people we need to communicate with and the number of people who need to understand it. When we just make one big team where everyone has to communicate with everyone the code tends to reflect this structure. As we can see the more people we add into a team the more the structure quickly starts to resemble something we all know all too well!

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When we follow the age old technique of divide and concquer, making small Agile teams that each work on a part of the code which is their single responsibility, it turns out that we end up getting encapsulation and modularity with dependencies managed between the modules.

No wonder the world is embracing agile everywhere nowadays!

You can of course do your own research on this, here are some org carts of some well known companies out there you can use to check the hypothesis for yourself!

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