Conway's Law - Examples

Examples

Consider a large system that a government wants to build. The government hires a company to build the system. Say the company has three engineering groups, E1, E2, and E3, that participate in the project. Conway's law suggests that it is likely that the resultant system will consist of 3 major subsystems (S1, S2, S3), each built by one of the engineering groups. More importantly, the resultant interfaces between the subsystems (S1-S2, S1-S3, etc.) will reflect the quality and nature of the real-world interpersonal communications between the respective engineering groups (E1-E2, E1-E3, etc.).

Another example: Consider a two-person team of software engineers, Joe and Jane. Say Joe designs and codes a software class X. Later, the team discovers that class X needs some new features. If Joe adds the features, he is likely to simply expand X to include the new features. If Jane adds the new features, she may be afraid of breaking X, and so instead will create a new derived class X2 that inherits X's features, and puts the new features in X2. So, in this example, the final design is a reflection of who implemented the functionality.

A real life example: NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter crashed because one team used United States customary units (e.g., inches, feet and pounds) while the other used metric units for a key spacecraft operation. This information was critical to the maneuvers required to place the spacecraft in the proper Mars orbit. "People sometimes make errors", said Dr. Edward Weiler, NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Science. "The problem here was not the error, it was the failure of NASA's systems engineering, and the checks and balances in our processes to detect the error. That's why we lost the spacecraft".

Conway's law may extend to the service industries; for example whether train services are run for the convenience of an individual company or for those they connect with (to the benefit of all). In Bill Bryson's Notes From a Small Island, Bryson gives an example where the only train of the day is scheduled to leave exactly two minutes before the bus to the station arrives.