Interlude – Conway's law

In 1968, Melvin Conway introduced the idea that the structure of an organization that designs software winds up copied in the organization of the software. This is called Conway's law.

The three-tier pattern, for instance, mirrors the way many organizations' IT departments are structured:

  • The database administrator team, or DBA team for short
  • The backend developer team
  • The frontend developer team
  • The operations team

Well, that makes four teams, but we can see the resemblance clearly between the architectural pattern and the organization.

The primary goal of DevOps is to bring different roles together, preferably in cross-functional teams. If Conway's law holds true, the organization of such teams would be mirrored ...

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