Conway’s Law and Open Science: Why it feels like something’s fundamentally not right

Some very quick notes on some reading I’ve been doing today on Conway’s law

The law basically has to do with the way organisational structures reflect themselves in the products they produce (also known as “mirroring”). So, to give a common example, corporate websites usually reflect the interests and organisational structures of the corporation rather than the information needs of the website visitor: a statement from the president welcoming you (who ever goes to a website for that?), tasks and locations grouped by reporting line rather than relevance to topic or user, and so on (Nielsen also makes this point in Designing Web Usability).

There are many different formulations of this law, ranging from the very software-specific to the very general. One interesting one, however, is in Coplien and Harrison’s Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development:

If the parts of an organization—such as teams, departments, or subdivisions—do not closely reflect the Read the rest of this entry »