From the course: Software Architecture Foundations
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Conway's law: Architecture and organizational structure
From the course: Software Architecture Foundations
Conway's law: Architecture and organizational structure
- Now that we've looked at the architect, let's shift focus a bit and start talking about architecture, starting with the discussion of Conway's Law. Mel Conway came up with this law back in the late '60s and it wasn't considered particularly important at the time. Nowadays, his thinking has become central to a lot of architectural and agile process thinking. The basic idea is that the architecture of your software and the communication structure of your organization have to match. Consider a traditional company, where the database concerns are handled by one department, the UI by another, the coding of the business logic by a third. These organizations are siloed in the sense that work goes on within the silo that's more or less invisible outside of it. Communication within the silo is much easier than communication between silos. Architecturally, we can think of this as a control issue. You have control over the code that you build inside your silo, but the code written elsewhere is…
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