Conway’s law applied to application and systems
We talked a lot about the limits of so-called “laws of software” in the first section of this chapter, so you may wonder why I will now spend several paragraphs talking about something that, at first sight, may seem similar. Nothing could be more different... Conway’s law is a true, stable guide for information systems design, as it does not state a recommendation but draws a theory from multiple observations and lets one decide its own conclusion on the subject.
Melvin Conway stated in 1967 that “any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure”. In our case study, which is information systems, this means that the architecture of the resulting system will reflect the structural organization of the team defining it, and this would imply the following:
- A team with a strong separation between frontend...
