TW洞见 | Sam Newman：康威定律

Posted 2021-04-24 ThoughtWorks洞见

关注“思特沃克ThoughtWorks”微信公众号，输入“洞见”或者“Insights”可以查看最新发布的洞见文章。

根据康威定律，正在构建中的系统以及它的设计结构，反映了组织内部的沟通结构。一项从哈佛商学院的分析也支持这样的对应关系。而ThoughtWorks所推崇的微服务架构，给予组织更多的灵活性，来让它们的系统架构遵从团队的结构，从而确保康威定律起作用。

Many years ago, Melvin Conway had observed that how organizations were structured would have a strong impact on any systems they created. In his “How Do Committees Invent" he wrote:

"Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure."

At the time, the Harvard Business Review rejected his original paper based on the fact that he hadn’t proved his hypothesis. Nonetheless, this observation has become known as Conway’s Law, and the collective experiences of both my colleagues and myself have time and again reinforced the truth of this statement. But you don’t have to take our word for it!

In "Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures", a study by The Harvard Business School carried out an analysis of different codebases to see if they could prove Conway’s original hypothesis as applied to software systems. In it, they took multiple examples of software created to solve the same purpose (for example word processing, financial management and database software), and compared the code bases created by loosely-coupled open source teams, and those created by tightly-coupled teams. Their study found that the often co-located, focused product teams created software that tended more towards tightly-coupled, monolithic codebases. Whereas the open source projects resulted in more modular, decomposed code bases.

Organizations for a few years now have understood this link between organizational structure and software they create, and have been embracing new structures in order to achieve the outcome they want. Netflix and Amazon for example structure themselves around multiple small teams, each one with responsibility for a small part of the overall system. These independent teams can own the whole lifecycle of the services they create, affording them a greater degree of autonomy than is possible for larger teams with more monolithic codebases. These services with their independent concerns can change and evolve separately from one another, resulting in the ability to deliver changes to production faster. If these organizations had adopted larger team sizes, the larger monolithic systems that would have emerged would not have given them the same ability to experiment, adapt, and ultimately keep their customers happy.

点击【阅读原文】可以继续查看精彩后文。