Thursday, April 23, 2020

Word of the Day: Conway's law

 
Word of the Day WhatIs.com
Daily updates on the latest technology terms | April 23, 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 monolithic codebases while the loosely-coupled teams tended to create more modular 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

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

 

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