Word of the Day: Conway's law

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Word of the Day Daily updates on the latest technology terms | February 28, 2020 Conway's law Conway's law is an observation that the design of any system is significantly affected by the communications structure of the organization that develops it. Melvin Conway, a computer scientist and programmer, developed his theory as the basis for a paper, "How do committees invent?" Conway submitted his paper in 1967 to the Harvard Business Review, but HBR rejected the paper on the grounds that Conway had not proved his thesis. The Harvard Business School subsequently conducted a study, "Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures," to attempt to prove Conway's thesis. Researchers compared the codebases of multiple applications of the same type that had been created by loosely-coupled development teams and tightly-coupled teams. They found that the tightly-coupled teams tended to develop tightly-coupled, monolithic codebases while the loosely-coupled open source teams tended to create more modular, decomposed codebases. It has been observed, similarly, that if multiple teams are working on program modules and inter-team communication is poor, the interfaces of the program will reflect that fact. Conway's law is often mentioned in reference to DevOps, which focuses on effective communication and collaboration among development and operations teams. Continue reading... Today's Takeaway "What Conway is saying is that if you have a four-person software team creating a compiler, you'll get a four-pass compiler as a result. Complex systems mimic the organizations that produce them and mirror the way in which people interact in your company." - Mark Benson Related Terms You Should Know design by committee organizational change management monolithic cross-functional team codebase DevOps 2.0 DevOps engineer loose coupling information silo I/O psychology DevOps Dojo Today's Buzzwords microservices A microservice architecture will work best when the company organizes staff into product teams and uses DevOps methodologies. meme There's a popular meme floating around the DevOps landscape and it's called Conway's law. application lifecycle management While an ALM framework can standardize the software development processes, it won't work if Conway's Law gets in the way. Yammer Once Yammer was introduced to Conway's law, they realized they had to rebuild their organizational structure. Writing for Business A _________ processes statements written in a particular programming language and turns them into machine language. a. compiler b. parser Answer Stay in Touch Thank you for reading! For feedback about any of our definitions or to suggest a new definition (or learning resource) please contact us at: editor@whatIs.com FOLLOW US About This E-Newsletter The Word of the Day is published by TechTarget, Inc., 275 Grove Street, Newton, Massachusetts, 02466 US. Click to: Unsubscribe. You are receiving this email because you are a member of TechTarget. When you access content from this email, your information may be shared with the sponsors or future sponsors of that content and with our Partners, see up-to-date Partners List, as described in our Privacy Policy. For additional information, please contact: webmaster@techtarget.com. © 2020 TechTarget, Inc. all rights reserved. Designated trademarks, brands, logos, and service marks are the property of their respective owners. Privacy Policy | Partners List