What Does Conway’s Law Mean?
Conway’s law is an aphorism in IT that posits the idea that “organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” This idea can be traced back to a programmer named Melvin Conway who developed this principle in the late 1960s.
Techopedia Explains Conway’s Law
Another way to explain Conway’s law is that the teams of people that work on a piece of software will make their own marks on its eventual design. One common example used is the example of a software compiler. One of the most frequently cited statements around Conway’s law states that “if you have four groups working on a compiler, you’ll get a four-pass compiler.” A software compiler can be either a one-pass compiler or a multi-pass compiler. The number of “passes” is the number of times that the compiler goes back over a piece of source code. The idea is that if there are multiple groups working on the compiler, each one will construct their own unique pass that will be different than any of the others.
