Who the Heck is Mel Conway?

In our continuing series, who the heck is Mel Conway?

Mel Conway was an American computer scientist in the 1960s famous for saying, "Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization communication structure."

For example, a contract research organization had eight people who were to produce a COBOL and an ALGOL compiler. After some initial estimates of difficulty in time, five people were assigned to the COBOL job and three people assigned to the ALGOL job.

The resulting COBOL compiler ran in five phases. The ALGOL compiler ran in three.

With Conway's law, there are three very important points.

1. Organizations and design slash architecture are intrinsically linked. The organization affects and constrains the architecture, the opposite is not true.

2. Depth of an organization negatively affects design flexibility. The deeper the hierarchy of an organization, the less flexible the resulting architecture.

3. We will make mistakes and must organize to quickly fix these.

Important corollaries to Conway's law suggest that if either an organization or a design change without a corresponding change to the other, the product will be a risk.

There are three very common failures in organization and architecture within our clients.

1. Organizations and architectures have been designed separately. Given the homomorphism that Conway describes, you simply cannot do this.

2. Deep hierarchical organizations do not foster agility and will constrain design.

3. Lack of flexibility. Companies tend to plan for success; instead assume failure learning and adaptation.

As you begin to design an organization for your development, think about these key takeaways on team alignment.

1. Team organization affects the architecture--design the two in parallel 

2. Organizational depth hurts flexibility and agility. Create as flat an organization as possible.

3. No design is perfect. Expect to have to adapt and respond quickly.

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