This post on Conway's Law is adapted from Chapter 2 of Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. Conway's Law Conway’s law is critical to understanding the forces at play when organizing teams amidst the long-lasting, unattended impact they can have on our software systems, as the latter have become larger and more interconnected than ever before. But you might wonder if a law from 1968 about software architecture has stood the test of time. We’ve come a long … [Read more...]
How to Design With Conway’s Law in Mind
Part 3 of 4: Where to Start with DevOps Series Over the past few weeks, we have been discussing the necessary steps to start your DevOps transformation. We covered the three key components to consider in choosing a starting place in this post: Selecting Which Value Stream to Start With We covered how value is delivered to the customer and how to improve flow in this post: Understand the Work in Our Value Stream and Improving Flow This week we are learning how and why to design with Conway's … [Read more...]
CASE STUDY: Etsy, Sprouter and Conway’s Law
The DevOps Handbook is now available. This is one of over 40 case studies you will find in the book. How we organize our teams affects how we perform our work. Dr. Melvin Conway proved this with a famous experiment he performed in 1968 with a contract research organization that had eight people who were commissioned to produce a COBOL and an ALGOL compiler. He observed, “After some initial estimates of difficulty and time, five people were assigned to the COBOL job and three to the ALGOL … [Read more...]
