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> once a team is big enough, all the invisible conceptual boundaries between domains blur and disappear Conway's law: Any organization that designs a system (

by est 4y ago

> once a team is big enough, all the invisible conceptual boundaries between domains blur and disappear Conway's law: Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
Precisely. But this is how it should be. The service is a part of the team, but automating the "mundane things" that people can delegate to machines, instead of doing them manually themselves. This is why, BTW, I'm so dismayed Elon Must fired 85% of Twitter. Now many of their critical services have teams of zero or one developer. Those are basically dead services walking.
- anon7725 4y ago
  > Precisely. But this is how it should be. The service is a part of the team, but automating the "mundane things" that people can delegate to machines, instead of doing them manually themselves. The organization is often not reflective of what’s actually being achieved. Instead of Catalog, Offer, Order and Shipment you have Alice’s org, Bob’s org and Charlie’s org. If you encode the interfaces between these (impermanent) group boundaries rather than the conceptual boundaries you enter a world of pain. Charlie might own Order and Shipment because Charlie is the warehouse exec and 20 years ago, when only physical items were sold, all of the order-processing computers were located in a cage in the warehouse. Fast forward to today and the cage is gone, and the order processing system handles digital items and services in addition to physical goods. But good old Charlie still owns the Order and Shipment system because they were baked together 20 years ago.
  - theptip 4y ago
    This is true, but I think things like DDD provide an antidote (or at least, some pressure to organize along different dimensions). If you are explicitly talking about business domains and bounded contexts, then you can see areas where the Alice/Bob split is not optimal (typically, lots of team coupling across org boundaries). Without those concepts I think it is easier to justify arbitrary political/territorial org structures. There is no panacea; one can always provide contorted justifications for things. But I think having a framework really helps, and particularly, having one that includes business stakeholders and not just pure technical functions.
Jenk 4y ago
"Microservices" are not just an acknowledgement of this law, they are a full blown exploitation of it. They are (supposed to be?) literal implementations of your organisation's boundaries/domains.

by est 4y ago

BulgarianIdiot 4y ago

Precisely. But this is how it should be. The service is a part of the team, but automating the "mundane things" that people can delegate to machines, instead of doing them manually themselves. This is why, BTW, I'm so dismayed Elon Must fired 85% of Twitter. Now many of their critical services have teams of zero or one developer. Those are basically dead services walking.

anon7725 4y ago
> Precisely. But this is how it should be. The service is a part of the team, but automating the "mundane things" that people can delegate to machines, instead of doing them manually themselves. The organization is often not reflective of what’s actually being achieved. Instead of Catalog, Offer, Order and Shipment you have Alice’s org, Bob’s org and Charlie’s org. If you encode the interfaces between these (impermanent) group boundaries rather than the conceptual boundaries you enter a world of pain. Charlie might own Order and Shipment because Charlie is the warehouse exec and 20 years ago, when only physical items were sold, all of the order-processing computers were located in a cage in the warehouse. Fast forward to today and the cage is gone, and the order processing system handles digital items and services in addition to physical goods. But good old Charlie still owns the Order and Shipment system because they were baked together 20 years ago.
- theptip 4y ago
  This is true, but I think things like DDD provide an antidote (or at least, some pressure to organize along different dimensions). If you are explicitly talking about business domains and bounded contexts, then you can see areas where the Alice/Bob split is not optimal (typically, lots of team coupling across org boundaries). Without those concepts I think it is easier to justify arbitrary political/territorial org structures. There is no panacea; one can always provide contorted justifications for things. But I think having a framework really helps, and particularly, having one that includes business stakeholders and not just pure technical functions.

Jenk 4y ago

"Microservices" are not just an acknowledgement of this law, they are a full blown exploitation of it. They are (supposed to be?) literal implementations of your organisation's boundaries/domains.