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From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) : [ foldoc ]
Conway's Law
The rule that the organisation of the
software and the organisation of the software team will be
congruent; originally stated as "If you have four groups
working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler".
Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker, wrote an assembler for
the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. The name "SAVE" didn't stand
for anything; it was just that you lost fewer card decks and
listings because they all had SAVE written on them.
[{Jargon File]
From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) : [ jargon ]
Conway's Law prov. The rule that the organization of the software and
the organization of the software team will be congruent; commonly stated
as "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass
compiler". The original statement was more general, "Organizations which
design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of
the communication structures of these organizations." This first
appeared in the April 1968 issue of Datamation. Compare SNAFU
principle.
The law was named after Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker who wrote
an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. (The name `SAVE' didn't
stand for anything; it was just that you lost fewer card decks and
listings because they all had SAVE written on them.)
There is also Tom Cheatham's amendment of Conway's Law: "If a group of
N persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be N-1 passes. Someone
in the group has to be the manager."