Conway's Law

“Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”

Melvin Conway, in How Do Committees Invent? (1968).

In practice: if three teams build a compiler, you get a three-pass compiler. Every boundary between teams becomes a boundary (an API, a service, a module) in the system, because that is where people need to negotiate.

It also works the other way around, which is called the inverse Conway maneuver: first design the architecture you want, then organize the teams around it. Microservices without independent teams tend to become a distributed monolith.

• See more at: Conway’s law | Martin Fowler