This is like Tufte's, Presenation recapitulates organization.
Conway's Law
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: Conway's Law
#12I am aware of this theoretical law but never really considered it. I suppose this could explain why I encountered such push back against a distributed SOA architecture on commodity hardware at a large organization that was built around centralized systems using mainframes.
Ultimately after three years of justifying and re-justifying the decisions I made for which they explicitly hired me for I moved on. It was abundantly clear that though they brought me in to implement SOA and lower physical costs, the culture just did not support that decision. What struck me as odd was that fact that those who hired me to do it did not seem to support it either.
I should note that Conway's law seems like a reasonable assumption as to why due to the monolithic and centralized nature of communication there. It was considered "taboo" to walk in to an executive managers office to speak to them. The expectation was to follow this ridiculously verbose chain of command whereby response to even a simple question could take days or even weeks.
Re: Conway's Law
#13If your app follows the MVC pattern, should the teams be similarly split into 3?
Re: Conway's Law
#14"organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." I'd say that organizations are not just constrained to do that -- they should. When you design systems and infrastructure, keep in mind that systems and solutions are under evolutionary pressure, and engineers have to change it all the time. When optimizing for change, y…
Probably you're just oversimplifying for brevity or something. But I've worked at plenty of projects where the team was sitting together, the product was a monolith, and it was still a problem. Coordination becomes easier, sitting together, but the need to coordinate, or the level with which people start "stepping on each other's toes" (code-wise) isn't reduced by it. I'm not saying all monoliths are bad, or that you…
Conway’s law doesn’t directly claim anything about the quality or effectiveness of the resulting system, but I suspect a corollary would also apply: that the effectiveness of a system is limited by the effectiveness of the communication structure of the organization that develops it.
Re: Conway's Law
#15I am aware of this theoretical law but never really considered it. I suppose this could explain why I encountered such push back against a distributed SOA architecture on commodity hardware at a large organization that was built around centralized systems using mainframes. Ultimately after three years of justifying and re-justifying the decisions I made for which they explicitly hired me for I moved on. It was abunda…
> The expectation was to follow this ridiculously verbose chain of command
> whereby response to even a simple question could take days or even weeks.
Re: Conway's Law
#16What do you build when everyone talks to each other over Slack?
Re: Conway's Law
#17What do you build when everyone talks to each other over Slack?
Microservices?
Re: Conway's Law
#18What do you build when everyone talks to each other over Slack?
depends on how they talk on slack and who talks to who.
The company I'm working with at the moment has separate slack per team with each time being ~5 persons and then some people from other team on each slack who pass message.... the communication is not great and the collaboration between services isn't either
Re: Conway's Law
#19What do you build when everyone talks to each other over Slack?
Microservices + Chat Ops
Re: Conway's Law
#20I feel old when these kind of Wikipedia pages make it to the front page and I was assuming that it was known and obvious for everyone.