Good Services

Conway said that if an organisation was made up of separated, isolated software engineers, then they were likely to produce separate, isolated services as a result. This separation wasn’t a problem, he said, so long as the designers of each of these pieces of software were able to communicate effectively with each other. This was because: ‘each piece of software cannot interface correctly with each other unless the designer and implementer of one piece of software communicates with the designer and implementer of another’. Crucially, this meant that ‘the structure of a software system necessarily will show a similarity with the social structure of the organisation that produced it.’