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.?

Conway's Law

    The rule (presumably formulated by Melvin
   Conway) that the organisation of software and the
   organisation of the software team will be congruent;
   originally stated as "If you have four groups working on a
   compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler".

   [Jargon File]

   (2015-12-30)