In short, Conway’s Law says any organisation that designs a system will come up with a system design that copies the organisational communication structures.

Over the years, many many people paraphrased Conway’s Law in many different ways.

Every paraphrase brings new insights and non-negligible consequences. Sometimes they give the impression they contradict each other. However, in the end, they all come to the same conclusion. The organisation and the system keep each other in balance. Modifying the organisation will have an impact on the system. Modifying the system will have consequences for the organisation. Not considering that will cause friction in the organisation or the system. That may have dramatic consequences from a design point of view, but even more so from a testability and quality perspective. It will slow down teams, reduce feedback and consequently drive down quality.

To be competitive as an organisation in the market, and to effectively design the right thing our customers expect us to deliver, we’d better understand and take advantage of this.

References:

• The Article: Shades of Conway’s Law
• The Architecture of Complexity, Simon, 1962
• Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Alexander, 1964
• Organizations in Action: Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory, Thompson, 1967
• How Do Committees Invent?, Melvin Conway, 1968
• On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules, Parnas, 1972
• Organization Design: An Information Processing View, Galbraith, 1974
• Structured Design, Edward Yourdon and Larry L. Constantine, 1979
• The New Hacker’s Dictionary (3rd ed.), Eric Raymond, 1996
• Organisational patterns of agile software development, James Coplien & Neil Harrison, 2004
• The Misalignment of Product Architecture and Organizational Structure in Complex Product Development, Sosa et al, 2004
• Identification of Coordination Requirements: Implications for the Design of Collaboration and Awareness Tools, Cataldo 2006
• The Impact of Misalignment of Organization Structure and Product Architecture on Quality in Complex Product Development, Gokpinar et al, 2007
• Return to Conway’s Law, Allan Kelly, 2006
• Release It!, Michael Nygard, 2007
• Conway’s Law, Ruth Malan, 2008
• Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architecture: A Test of the “Mirroring” Hypothesis, MacCormack, Rusnak, Baldwin, 2012
• Continuous Delivery and Conway’s Law, Allan Kelly, 2014
• Toward Simplifying Application Development in a Dozen Lessons, Mel Conway, 2016
• The Mirroring Hypothesis: theory, evidence, and exceptions, Colfer and Baldwin, 2016
• Accelerate, Nicole Forsgren, PhD and friends, 2018
• Accidental Architects: How HR Designs Software Systems, Matthew Skelton
• Conway’s Law Doesn’t Apply to Rigid Designs, Mathias Verraes, 2022
• Conversation on Conway’s Law with Ruth Malan on Mastodon
• Isomorphism vs Homomorphism, Michael McCliment