Conway's law

Conway's law goes back to an essay from 1968 (Conway, Melvin, 1968, p31):

"Organizations which design systems (…) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structure of the organizations."

– Melvin E. Conway

The law is not specific to software or system architecture but to the design of any system. Note that it is not referring to an organization's management structure but its communication structure. These might be the same thing – but in some cases, it's not. Normally, if the organizational chart does not match the software design, you can look for the communication flow, and it is different from the organizational chart.

If, for example, you have many small teams or individual developers that receive requirements from different customers or consultants, they will probably talk to each other without any organizational boundaries. The system they are working on will reflect...