Relationship between team organization and application architecture

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 12:06:03 +0000

This relationship is known as Conway’s law, which was made by Melvin Conway in 1967 and reads as follows: “Organizations that design systems […] are limited to producing designs that are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

Communication within the team is frequent and fluid, with regular planning meetings, dailies, retrospectives and demos. This allows the team to have a high level of alignment and agile coordination, which is fundamental to the development of a component. If you suddenly decide to split this team into 2 teams, there is a disconnect in communication. Communication with other teams is much less frequent, as one of the ideas of teams is to isolate them from externalities so that they can focus on their scope. This reduction in communication between teams makes the task of maintaining a single component more complex. In these cases, there are two options: 1) Split the component into 2, one per team, this allows the teams to decouple and work more autonomously. 2) to keep a single component, which implies setting up a series of coordination mechanisms and meetings between the teams, with the overload that this entails. In addition, the teams are interdependent, which reduces speed and autonomy and affects productivity (since they have to work so closely together, we could almost say that for practical purposes there is still only one team).

Teams on CTOMultiplier

Relationship between team organization and application architecture