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