17 lines
2.8 KiB
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17 lines
2.8 KiB
HTML
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>Conway's Law</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../C.html" title="C"/><link rel="previous" href="control-S.html" title="control-S"/><link rel="next" href="cookbook.html" title="cookbook"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">Conway's Law</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="control-S.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">C</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="cookbook.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="Conways-Law"/><dt xmlns="" id="Conways-Law"><b>Conway's Law</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="grammar">prov.</span></dt></dt><dd><p> The rule that the organization of the software and the organization
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of the software team will be congruent; commonly stated as “<span class="quote">If you
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have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass
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compiler</span>”. The original statement was more general,
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“<span class="quote">Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce
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designs which are copies of the communication structures of these
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organizations.</span>” This first appeared in the April 1968 issue of
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<a href="../D/Datamation.html"><i class="glossterm">Datamation</i></a>. Compare
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<a href="../S/SNAFU-principle.html"><i class="glossterm">SNAFU principle</i></a>.</p></dd><dd><p>The law was named after Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker who
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wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. (The name
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‘SAVE’ didn't stand for anything; it was just that you lost
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fewer card decks and listings because they all had SAVE written on them.)
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There is also Tom Cheatham's amendment of Conway's Law: “<span class="quote">If a group
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of N persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be N-1 passes.
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Someone in the group has to be the manager.</span>”</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="control-S.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../C.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="cookbook.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">control-S </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> cookbook</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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