Conway’s law
Systems end up shaped like the communication structure of the organization that builds them.
Melvin Conway observed it in 1968: three teams building a compiler produce a three-pass compiler. Service boundaries drawn against team boundaries keep needing cross-team meetings and drift back. The inverse Conway maneuver uses this on purpose: organize teams around the bounded contexts you want, and the architecture tends to follow.
Related terms
- Microservices: An architecture where a system is built from small, separately deployed services, each owning its data and talking to the others over the network.
- Bounded context: A part of a system where each business term has one meaning and one model, with explicit translation at its edges.
- Modular monolith: One deployable application split inside into modules with clear boundaries, each owning its data and using the others only through defined interfaces.
