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= C =
cookbook
Conway's Law prov.
The rule that the organization of
the software and the organization of the software team will be
congruent; commonly stated as "If you have four groups working on
a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler". The original statement
was more general, "Organizations which design systems are
constrained to produce designs which are copies of the
communication structures of these organizations." This first
appeared in the April 1968 issue of Datamation. Compare
SNAFU principle.
The law was named after Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker who
wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. (The name
`SAVE' didn't stand for anything; it was just that you lost fewer
card decks and listings because they all had SAVE written on them.)
There is also Tom Cheatham's amendment of Conway's Law:
"If a group of N persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be
N-1 passes. Someone in the group has to be the manager."
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.
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