Conway's law
Organizational communication shapes system design.
Conway's law states that a system's design mirrors the communication patterns of the organization that built it. Melvin Conway, a computer programmer, introduced this idea in 1967. While most often applied to software, the law's reasoning holds true across many technical fields.
Quick Facts
- Named after
- Melvin Conway
- Introduced
- 1967
- Original field
- Computer science and programming
- Primary application
- Software architecture
Facts from the source article.
Interpretations
The law is strictly about correspondence, not causation; it does not state that communication structure causes system structure, only that a connection exists. Commentators have taken various positions on the direction of causality, including that technical design causes organizational restructuring, that organizational structure dictates technical design, or both. Originally intended as a sociological observation, the law has been interpreted in humorous contexts, as in The New Hacker's Dictionary, and as a serious universal principle, as at the 1968 National Symposium on Modular Programming. Opinions vary on whether the mirroring pattern is helpful, undesirable, or a necessary compromise.
Examples
Nigel Bevan stated in a 1997 paper that organizations often produce websites with content and structure mirroring internal concerns rather than user needs. Researchers from MIT and Harvard Business School found strong evidence supporting the mirroring hypothesis, showing that a product developed by a loosely-coupled organization is significantly more modular than one from a tightly-coupled organization. Additional supportive case studies have been conducted by Nagappan, Murphy and Basili at the University of Maryland in collaboration with Microsoft, and by Syeed and Hammouda at Tampere University of Technology in Finland.
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