Conway’s Three Other Laws

Conway’s Three Other Laws

Optimizing Teams in a Distributed World

Most of us know about Conway’s adage “Any organization will produce a design which is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” But Conway coined four laws in his 1968 paper “How Committees Invent.” What are the other ones? Why are we not talking about them? And what do they tell us about optimizing teams in a distributed world?

The recent rise of the microservices meme, the continued push to improve agility and autonomy of software teams, and the increased likelihood that teams are spread across the globe, are all related, even if they are at times in opposition to each other.

This talk looks at the work of Mel Conway, Fred Brooks, Robin Dunbar, and others; synthesizing advice and guidance on how we can learn from the last 50 years of research and experience in building and managing teams. We see how distance affects communication, and how we can create teams that produce the code we expect at the speed, level of complexity, coupling, and reliability necessary to succeed in today’s distributed world.

Here is a list of the references I mentioned in the talk along w/ some additional recommended reading.

Director of API Architecture, API Academy, CA Technologies

An internationally known author and lecturer, Mike Amundsen travels throughout the world consulting and speaking on a wide range of topics including distributed network architecture, Web application development, and other subjects.

In his role of Director of Architecture for the API Academy, Amundsen heads up the API Architecture and Design Practice in North America. He is responsible for working with companies to provide insight on how best to capitalize on the myriad opportunities APIs present to both consumers and the enterprise.

Amundsen has authored numerous books and papers on programming over the last 15 years. His last book was a collaboration with Leonard Richardson titled "RESTful Web APIs" published in 2013. His 2011 book, “Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node”, is an oft-cited reference on building adaptable Web applications. He is currently working to complete a new book - "Learning Client Hypermedia" due out from O’Reilly in late 2015.