Papers We Love #2 - How do committees invent? (Melvin E. Conway)

Hey! 😀

In the 2nd edition of Papers We Love, we tackled the famous article Mel Conway’s article where he introduced his law.

You probably already know the quote:

Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

We’ve read the whole paper to check how up-to-date it is nowadays. Not surprisingly, it has stood the test of time. It’s a basis for properly modelling our system design and organizational structure. It impacted all current socio-technical approaches, such as Team Topologies, both agile and more rigid approaches.

Watch (or listen as a podcast) the episode and drop comments with your thoughts and experience facing the Mel Conway law. I’m sure you have plenty of them!

Check also additional reading:

• the article: https://www.melconway.com/Home/pdf/committees.pdf,

• Martin Fowler’s thoughts on Conway’s Law,

• Johny LeRoy’s article where he introduced “Inverse Conway Maneuver”

• Mathias Verraes’ thoughts on both Conway’s Law and Inverse Conway Maneuver,

• Matthew Skelton’s and Manuel Pais’ quick intro to Team Topologies.

Check also other webinars!

---

Webinars:

• #1 - From CRUD to Event Sourcing

• #2 - Keep your streams short! Or how to model Event-Sourced systems efficiently

• #3 - Implementing Distributed Processes

• #4 - From CRUD to CQRS in Practice

• #5 - Architecture Weekly 100 Edition - Live Q&A

• #6 - Alexey Zimarev - You don't need an Event Sourcing framework. Or do you?

• #7 - Design and test Event-Driven projections and read models

• #8 - Slim down your aggregates!

• #9 - Radek Maziarka - Modularization with Event Storming Process Level

• #10 - PostgreSQL Superpowers in Practice

• #11 - Maciej "MJ" Jędrzejewski - Evolutionary Architecture: The What. The Why. The How.

• #12 - Jeremy D. Miller: Simplify your architecture with Wolverine

• #13 - Yves Goeleven - The Fantastic 9

• #14 - Mateusz Jendza - Why Verified Credentials is the Future of Digital Identity!

• #15 - Mário Bittencourt: Leveraging BPMN for Seamless Team Collaboration in Software Development

• #16 - Papers We Love #1 - Sagas (Hector Garcia-Molina, Kenneth Salem)

• #17 - Simple patterns for events schema versioning

• #18 - Andrea Magnorsky: Introducing Bytesize Architecture Sessions!

• #19 - Laïla Bougriâ: Debug your thinking

• #20 - Papers We Love #2 - How do committees invent? (Melvin E. Conway)