Architectures, coordination, and distance: Conway's law and beyond

Abstract

Software engineering researchers have long argued that the architecture of a system plays a pivotal role in coordinating development work. Over 30 years ago, Melvin Conway proposed what has since become known as Conway's Law-that the structure of the system mirrors the structure of the organization that designed it. 1 This relation, Conway argued, is a necessary consequence of the communication needs of the people doing the work. David Parnas, in fact, defined a software module as "a responsibility assignment rather than a subprogram," 2 driving home the idea that modular design enables decisions about the internals of each module to be made independently. Of course, the computer that runs the software doesn't care. The point of structure is to support coordination of the development work. Architecture, however, addresses only one of the several dimensions on which we must coordinate development. To support efficient use of resources, projects require plans that specify when milestones must be completed and who will do the Architectures, Coordination, and Distance: Conway's Law and Beyond Geographically distributed development teams face ex traordinary communication and coordination problems. The authors' case study clearly demonstrates how common but unanticipated events can stretch project communication to the breaking point. Project schedules can fall apar t, par ticularly during integration. Modular design is necessary, but not sufficient to avoid this fate.

Herding cats in a FOSS ecosystem: a tale of communication and coordination for release management

“…Therefore, virtual teams rely on trust; but it takes time to establish trust in complex environments [32,43,50] like in a FOSS ecosystem. Building trust is important for team coordination, as it has been reported that the lack of trust is a barrier to team coordination that geographically distributed organizations face [28,29].…”

Global Software Engineering: The Future of Socio-technical Coordination

“…Adopting an architecture tends to guide developers toward compatible decisions, assuming there is effective communication and a common understanding of what the architecture actually is [37,54].…”

An Examination of the Effects of Offshore and Outsourced Development on the Delegation of Responsibilities to Software Components

“…Locational asynchrony arises from factors like differences in geography and time zones. An example of LA would be the difficulty in explaining a simple architectural block diagram over email or telephone conversation, which can be easily accomplished with a white board and markers in a room of people (something similar to the consequence of distance highlighted in [10]). Perceptional asynchrony tends to be more subtle, and is caused by the complex interplay of stakeholder interests that dispersed development essentially entails.…”

“…Herbsleb and Grinter in their papers [10], [11] have taken a more social view of distributed software development. In terms of Conway's Law -organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations [4] -Herbsleb and Grinter seek to establish the importance of the match between how software components collaborate and how the members of the teams that develop the software components collaborate.…”