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."
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {gang bang}{SNAFU principle}]