2 ms·

Conway's law would still apply in a company where the org chart is changing. Obviously old systems don't disappear in a reorg, but new ones will reflect the com

Conway's law would still apply in a company where the org chart is changing. Obviously old systems don't disappear in a reorg, but new ones will reflect the communication structures at the time that they were built. In companies that go through frequent reorgs, you'll often see a lot of "scar tissue," where you can tell that one set of services date back to a particular epoch. For example, these services are from a different time when the company tried to enter a new market, and here's a bunch of messy microservices from when the company added a bunch of developers after the Series C and the engineering processes failed to keep up. And along the way, you'll see a bunch of half-finished migrations that require both the old and new systems to be maintained simultaneously. In your example, if that org is adapted to frequently shifting team boundaries with some central top-down architectural authority (CTO, architect, committee, whatever), then Conway's law would predict exactly the kind of modular architecture with a "shared design approach" that you describe.

btbuildem 3y ago
When I look at a nightmare scenario like Salesforce, I am inclined to agree with you.
ivan_gammel 3y ago
>but new ones will reflect the communication structures at the time that they were built It is correlation vs causality question. Conway law may actually be the former rather than the latter.
dredmorbius 3y ago
I spent a fair bit of my career working with a piece of software which has evolved across a number of different operating systems, and, one presumes, development teams. Among the reasons I refer to myself, tongue in cheek, as a software anthropologist, is what I'd recognised from that software: it bears the marks of the major platforms it evolved through: IBM mainframes, VMS, Unix, MS Windows, and ultimately an Apple Macintosh variant (though principally the tool now seems to be PC-oriented). Similarly, on Unix, one can often identify applications' origins based on their toolkits and widgets: Athena Xaw widgets, Motif, VUE, KDE, GNOME, etc. Though often criticised for the lack of consistency, I'm aware that different tools reveal their affordances by the toolkits (and GUI presentation and behaviour) they reveal. Similarly BSD vs. GNU command-line tools, and various other command origins. Particularly notably, the 'dd' command, which comes from, and borrows syntax from, IBM TCL, a mainframe environment. Digging deeper, Unix's origins in Multics, the B programming language, etc., are also apparent. Again, this is somewhat confounding tools and teams, though I'd suggest that the principles are similar and related. The upshot is that past decisions get layered into software, with the oldest layers typically closest to the core.
pvdoom 3y ago
This. Conways law is about the actual organization, not the orgchart.

btbuildem 3y ago

When I look at a nightmare scenario like Salesforce, I am inclined to agree with you.

ivan_gammel 3y ago

>but new ones will reflect the communication structures at the time that they were built It is correlation vs causality question. Conway law may actually be the former rather than the latter.

dredmorbius 3y ago

I spent a fair bit of my career working with a piece of software which has evolved across a number of different operating systems, and, one presumes, development teams. Among the reasons I refer to myself, tongue in cheek, as a software anthropologist, is what I'd recognised from that software: it bears the marks of the major platforms it evolved through: IBM mainframes, VMS, Unix, MS Windows, and ultimately an Apple Macintosh variant (though principally the tool now seems to be PC-oriented). Similarly, on Unix, one can often identify applications' origins based on their toolkits and widgets: Athena Xaw widgets, Motif, VUE, KDE, GNOME, etc. Though often criticised for the lack of consistency, I'm aware that different tools reveal their affordances by the toolkits (and GUI presentation and behaviour) they reveal. Similarly BSD vs. GNU command-line tools, and various other command origins. Particularly notably, the 'dd' command, which comes from, and borrows syntax from, IBM TCL, a mainframe environment. Digging deeper, Unix's origins in Multics, the B programming language, etc., are also apparent. Again, this is somewhat confounding tools and teams, though I'd suggest that the principles are similar and related. The upshot is that past decisions get layered into software, with the oldest layers typically closest to the core.

pvdoom 3y ago

This. Conways law is about the actual organization, not the orgchart.