Michael Feathers isn’t so quick to place negative connotations on Conway’s Law. Perhaps it’s not so much that organizations don’t communicate well, the traditional reading of Conway’s Law. Maybe as organizations grow, people tend to only communicate frequently with a few people and those interactions end up defining the API layers.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately. It’s possible there’s something to be said about using Conway’s Law to your advantage when building service-based shearing layers. Some parts of your application should evolve quickly, others require more stability. Some iterate based on user and conversion testing, others iterate as TDD or BDD projects. You can discover these layers by observing team interactions and using Conway’s Law to define where the APIs belong.
