Conway's Law: When Best Practices Are Not Enough
summary
Conway’s Law explains why product design, UX and code quality mirror who talks to whom: a Microsoft analysis of 15 million lines across 3,000 binaries finds organizational structure predicts production bugs better than code coverage; a travel platform split by country yields duplicated, unshared components; a consulting website exposes the org chart not user needs. Remedies are concrete: apply the inverse Conway maneuver using Domain‑Driven Design with EventStorming and context maps, align teams via Team Topologies, and refactor systems before reorganizing.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Conway's Law introduction
- 6:25Forces shaping software design
- 9:17Microsoft Vista case
- 13:32Train reservation failure
- 17:34Melvin Conway's principle
- 22:29Conway's Law in orgs
- 26:30Communication vs system quality
- 30:41Conway's Law examples
- 32:52Avoiding Conway's Law
- 34:59Inverse Conway Maneuver
- 36:50B model in design
- 38:16DDD and business alignment
- 42:29Team Topologies load
- 46:24Managing best practices
- 47:47Conclusion human impact
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