2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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Conway's Law
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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prov. The rule that the organization of the software and the organization of
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the software team will be congruent; commonly stated as If you have four
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groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler. The original
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statement was more general, Organizations which design systems are
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constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication
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structures of these organizations. This first appeared in the April 1968
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issue of Datamation. Compare SNAFU principle. The law was named after Melvin
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Conway, an early proto-hacker who wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220
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called SAVE. (The name SAVE didn't stand for anything; it was just that you
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lost fewer card decks and listings because they all had SAVE written on
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them.) There is also Tom Cheatham's amendment of Conway's Law: If a group of
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N persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be N-1 passes. Someone in
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the group has to be the manager.
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