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Conway's Law isn't a "law" - it is an interesting observation and there are definitely interactions (both ways) between organizational structure and software "d

Conway's Law isn't a "law" - it is an interesting observation and there are definitely interactions (both ways) between organizational structure and software "design". But people weigh it too heavily. There are plenty of counterexamples of, for instances, fine-grained teams in one company that build a monolith, and the same type of teams in another company building a microservices architecture. Complex software is complex, and once your require more than a handful of people, that complexity requires a complex organization structure to handle the challenges of communication and responsibility. But it isn't a purely deterministic relationship between organizational structure and software structure. More that certain organizational structures are really bad at building complex software, and some are better. It is interesting to think about, but there is this tendency to invoke "Conway's Law" as some simple method of fixing the extraordinary complex problem of developing and evolving complex software over time. Really what it is is that organizations from the 70s, 80s, and 90s were built around building physical things, for the most part. Manufacturing and construction, mostly. And taking those organizations and applying them to software development fundamentally was a terrible match. We had to find new structures that were better suited, and we have gotten a lot better, but we are still working on it. Management was taught by those that managed manual laborers, who's output was easy to measure, and whom you could force to work a certain amount without a significant drop in their output. The same isn't true for knowledge workers. And so new management had to be created, a process we still are working on as well, but many managers these days are way better than managers from 30 years ago. Read Conway's original paper, it is interesting, but it isn't a physical Law that cannot be violated!

lolinder 3y ago
> But people weigh it too heavily. There are plenty of counterexamples of, for instances, fine-grained teams in one company that build a monolith, and the same type of teams in another company building a microservices architecture. These aren't counterexamples because Conway's law makes no comment on how the teams will choose to deploy what they build. It talks about the overall design of the system, the solution space that was explored. Windows is a monolithic application if the alternative is microservices, but anyone who gives it more than a cursory glance can see the org chart (both past and present!) reflected in the disjointed UX. > And so new management had to be created, a process we still are working on as well, but many managers these days are way better than managers from 30 years ago. I'm not sure why this makes Conway's law not applicable anymore—what you're describing is that new management does a better job of creating communication structures that lend themselves well to creating software. That may well be correct, but the resulting improvements validate Conway's law! If we're getting better at software, it may well be because people are talking about and accounting for the impact that communication structures have on the output.
adql 3y ago
> There are plenty of counterexamples of, for instances, fine-grained teams in one company that build a monolith, and the same type of teams in another company building a microservices architecture. ...like ?
- saltminer 3y ago
  Oracle certainly has. Several GBUs realized they were working towards the same goal of a microservices base layer for future service hosting (for handling auth, logging, databases, etc.) and combined their efforts, and I happened to work on one of the resulting teams. I'm not sure how public they've been about all this, but you certainly can teach an old dog new tricks, provided there is management buy-in (which we certainly had - at one point, our teams were moved between GBUs to save us from budget cuts).
krig 3y ago
It’s not a physical law - it relates to people - “law” has a wider meaning outside the field of physics. I recommend watching the talk! He specifically addresses the very points you bring up. Of course reality is messy and people especially so, but Conway’s law is one of very few theories within CS that has held up in replication studies.

lolinder 3y ago

> But people weigh it too heavily. There are plenty of counterexamples of, for instances, fine-grained teams in one company that build a monolith, and the same type of teams in another company building a microservices architecture. These aren't counterexamples because Conway's law makes no comment on how the teams will choose to deploy what they build. It talks about the overall design of the system, the solution space that was explored. Windows is a monolithic application if the alternative is microservices, but anyone who gives it more than a cursory glance can see the org chart (both past and present!) reflected in the disjointed UX. > And so new management had to be created, a process we still are working on as well, but many managers these days are way better than managers from 30 years ago. I'm not sure why this makes Conway's law not applicable anymore—what you're describing is that new management does a better job of creating communication structures that lend themselves well to creating software. That may well be correct, but the resulting improvements validate Conway's law! If we're getting better at software, it may well be because people are talking about and accounting for the impact that communication structures have on the output.

adql 3y ago

> There are plenty of counterexamples of, for instances, fine-grained teams in one company that build a monolith, and the same type of teams in another company building a microservices architecture. ...like ?

saltminer 3y ago
Oracle certainly has. Several GBUs realized they were working towards the same goal of a microservices base layer for future service hosting (for handling auth, logging, databases, etc.) and combined their efforts, and I happened to work on one of the resulting teams. I'm not sure how public they've been about all this, but you certainly can teach an old dog new tricks, provided there is management buy-in (which we certainly had - at one point, our teams were moved between GBUs to save us from budget cuts).

krig 3y ago

It’s not a physical law - it relates to people - “law” has a wider meaning outside the field of physics. I recommend watching the talk! He specifically addresses the very points you bring up. Of course reality is messy and people especially so, but Conway’s law is one of very few theories within CS that has held up in replication studies.