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... |
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