#85 – Conway’s Law

Named after programmer Melvin Conway, Conway’s Law states that organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. This is a problem because most organizations still are very silo-oriented, and when the processes typically span across functional areas, there are going to be quite some handovers as well as lack of process ownership and accountability. Instead, the Inverse Conway Manoeuvre, where we design our organization based on the high-level architecture of our applications, could be a better approach (if the architecture is good enough, that is).