Does Conway's Law Hold?

Question

I understand Conway's Law as saying that any organization that designs or produces a product is destined/doomed to produce a product that is an image of their organizational structure. I originally though it was meant to be comedic, but have seen it play out a number of times in the projects I've worked in. When there are two development teams that are seperated geographically and socially, the product comes back in two parts that don't communicate well. When there are three groups, three parts, etc.

The question is this - has your experience in development reflected this as well?

Further - what can be done to counteract this effect? How are the massively distributed projects, like the big open source projects, impacted by this?

Answer 1

Conway's law holds by default. It can be overridden by a powerful mind.

Answer 2

I agree with your observations. I've worked at several companies that had worldwide development centers, or have outsourced parts of their products overseas. Cultural differences became evident in design, function, coding standards, comments (I fondly recall inheriting a module to maintain, that was commented throughout in Russian, where all the variables looked like k1, k2, k3 etc. :)).

As for the other part, larger organizations tend to hire certain type of product managers. Even if they had an innovative and independent approach before they joined, they are forced to accede to prior design/conceptions. That's why the UI and flow of some of the products developed by those companies become convoluted over time.

If I had to add a corollary to Conway's law it would be that given enough time, these applications would evolve to a state that is completely unusable by the public and only understandable by the organizations that produced them.