Conway's Law [was: Point of Extensibility]

Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, 2008-04-03 23:30 +0300:

>  The Web platform already has Conway's Law written all over it, but we 
>  shouldn't make the situation worse by adding more syntactic sign posting 
>  between the parts created by different Working Groups. It's bad enough that 
>  to script the DOM you need to know which element (or, in the case of XLink, 
>  attribute!) came from which committee and use a different namespace URI 
>  accordingly.

Before seeing this mention of Conway's Law in your message, I got
to admit I don't remember ever hearing of it. But after reading
about it, it seems to me worth citing the actual wording here for
the record:

  Conway's Law states:
    - Organizations which design systems are constrained to
      produce designs which are copies of the communication
      structures of these organizations.
    - If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a
      4-pass compiler.
  Or more concisely:
    - Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure
      that produced it.

Given some of the communications structures we're working with, I
guess the idea provides a lot of food for thought/amusement/worry.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://people.w3.org/mike/
http://sideshowbarker.net/