Conway’s Law Corollary: Agile Culture
“Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” Mel Conway.
This quote above is what Fred Brooks called Conway’s Law. Now stop and think of it… got it? Now realize that yes it’s true and the consequences of this law are literally everywhere people, processes and technology join to create a system.
Reflecting on the far reaching consequences of Conway’s Law we could also conclude this corollary:
“Any organization whose structure and communication style tends to openness, collaboration, delivering value and embracing change will naturally become a successful Agile Organization. Or briefly organizational culture will eventually create an Agile Organization.”
So Agile Cultures, Agile Organizations that communicate in agile ways already will foster and eventually create Agile Software Development!
Agility itself is a product of an organizational culture and communication style that stops and thinks about how to build systems. This reflection process then becomes the Agile Organization with all the processes, systems, and computer languages that go along with it.
I dare say that not just organizations but people, who follow the description I gave previously will gravitate toward agility. It will just happen. As an example take Graham Glass who went from a personal Agile Culture to an Agile Methodology, also going from Java to Rails. Probably not just because it was the cool thing to do, but the right thing to do given his own personal culture.
As a last note, sometimes only Java or C will do the job. C is a particularly critical case in point, sometimes there is just no other way to get things done. But even on those rare occasions the organization can and will remain agile as long as they have an Agile Culture. Efforts like Scala and Objective-C show that even in those circumstances people and organizations will try to get a better tool anyway!
