Conway's Law


Conway's Law

(project, humour)The rule that the organisation of thesoftware and the organisation of the software team will becongruent; originally stated as "If you have four groupsworking on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler".

Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker, wrote an assembler forthe Burroughs 220 called SAVE. The name "SAVE" didn't standfor anything; it was just that you lost fewer card decks andlistings because they all had SAVE written on them.