jargon

Architecture & practice·Teams, ownership and Conway's law

the system has four services and the company has four teams, and nobody planned that.

Conway's law

Organisations produce designs that mirror their own communication structure. It is an observation rather than advice, and it holds because the interfaces that are easy to change are the ones inside a team and the ones that are hard are the ones between teams. It explains a great deal that looks like bad engineering: an unnecessary service boundary is often just the place where two groups found it easier to define an API than to talk every day.

Commonly confused with