What is Conway’s Law? with Michael Feathers
For this WTFinar, we’ve got a damn legend in the house—the one and only, Michael Feathers. And the legend says, “It’s what’s on the inside that counts.”
This is true for people, eclairs, systems, and organizations.
The nature of programming is changing as we shift to building cloud-based systems through DevOps and more social coding. This has implications.
As Melvin E. Conway famously observed: “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”
If the structure on the inside is good, they’re likely to make good stuff.
Simply put, great communication structure = great social coding.
Overcoming common legacy-code challenges can be seen as the original social coding.
For anyone who truly wants to understand how to tackle this, there is one go-to reference. Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Feathers’s book first published in 2004, remains as influential as ever.
In this WTFinar, WTF is Conway’s Law, Feathers will talk about aspects of social coding such as:
- how to keep conversations with a team member safe when you have different approaches to solving an engineering problem
- how you ensure that the changes you make to a system don’t have unexpected consequences
- How organizational structure and communication patterns can impact the quality of the code a team produces
- how you can execute an ‘Inverse Conway Manoeuvre’ to promote your desired architecture