Conway's Law (persone e sw)

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Conway's Law (persone e sw)

Conway's Law

Organizations that design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of the organization.

Conway's Law is a valid sociological observation. You can find case studies from the Harvard Business School (here the pdf) and from Microsoft Research (here the publication and also here: The Influence of Organizational Structure on Software Quality: An Empirical Case Study).

Some interesting pratical example of organizational and cultural factors is in Mike Cohn presentation: Scaling Scrum and Working with Distributed Teams

It is interesting to note that also gender and character can essentially influence the coding style . E.g. read Men Write Code From Mars, Women Write More Helpful Code From Venus

Print | posted @ sabato 24 ottobre 2009 13.12

Comments on this entry:

# re: Conway's Law (persone e sw)

by Alex M at 25/10/2009 12.23

luKa, that's another inspiring piece of information. Thanks.

Can't find "Men Write Code from Mars, Women Write More Helpful Code from Venus" article tho. Link, apparently seems to be broken. Google cache didn't work; Any suggestions or could you possibly point me out where I could find that article?

Ta!

# re: Conway's Law (persone e sw)

by Luca Minudel at 25/10/2009 20.20

Hi Alex, thank you for reporting the broken link.

I've fixed the link, now it point to another post with the full article (originally published on-line by the wall street journal).

Here also a similar study conducted with scientific methods that investigate the differences on Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts