Conway’s law

“organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
- Melvin Conway ‘68

Conway introduced the idea that in order to decrease the amount of friction in daily work teams will naturally strive to adopt a software architecture that becomes similar to the communication patterns of their organisation. This means that two separated organisations working together to deliver a system will likely benefit from dividing that system into two sub systems. This will allow the organisations to work independently to some degree and thereby decrease the friction caused by the separated organisations. Naturally an organisation will strive to reduce external dependencies either in communication with other organisations or with other systems.

This connection between organisation and technology is an important revelation to keep in mind whenever changing either organisation structure or architecture.

A Conway maneuver means to adapt the architecture to the desired organisation, an inverse Conway maneuver means to adapt the organisation to the desired architecture.

Melvin Edward Conway