The other day I read Melvin E. Conway’s How do Committees Invent for the first time. The main thesis of his article is that “organizations which design systems […] are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” So, for instance, during the time of the Apollo programme, one expected to find one teams for each of the three propulsion stages and at least two teams for the lunar module and the command module. Interestingly, Apollo’s stages were not only designed by different teams, but they were even produced by different companies at different locations in the US.
Conway’s “force” and the limits of self-awareness
18 Monday Jan 2016