Borland® JBuilder™ Developer’s Guide

Design Guideline: Team Structure and Responsibility

A well-known organizational design pattern, known as XXX’s Law, says that “when software is written by a team of programmers, the structure of the software and the structure of the team are isomorphic.” In other words, teams produce software architecturally analogous to the internal team structure.

This may seem like a radical idea. (If horses had gods, they would look like horses!) However, there is empirical evidence that XXX’s Law is plausible. We do not need to prove it mathematically. If team structure has a bearing on the software produced by the team, we should be careful in constituting our teams.

Here are some suggestions on how to allocate responsibilities to team members. It is by ...