[HN Gopher] How do Committees Invent? (1968) [pdf] ___________________________________________________________________ How do Committees Invent? (1968) [pdf] Author : arkj Score : 29 points Date : 2022-03-20 03:46 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.melconway.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.melconway.com) | drallison wrote: | Back when figuring out software engineering and systems design | was all the rage, Mel Conway's paper was a fave. His observation | --that system designs tend to mimic the social structure of the | development team--was critical when it came to understanding | systems and their development. Now, I suspect that, 52 years | later, the observation (based upon longitudinal studies) still | holds and that the ways committees invent are still not | understood. | | Mel wrote an influential paper on coroutines and compilers, | "Design of a Separable Transition-diagram Compiler", which | included the first published explanation of the concept proposed | organizing a compiler as a set of coroutines. Several compilers | based upon his approach were built in the early 1970s at SRI and | at consulting firm Polymorphic. | | Mel also applied for and received US Patent 6272622, Dataflow | Processing With Events, which expired in 2019. The patent is very | broad and insightful. | cryptonector wrote: | A great example of Conway's law is Active Directory. Someone at | Microsoft figured out that they needed a) new authentication | technology (Kerberos, which was new in the sense of "better | than NTLM"), b) a general-purpose directory that (a) could use, | c) also a general-purpose directory that could be used to serve | DNS. What's surprising is that this then led MSFT to create a | team to do all three things rather than have disparate, far- | flung teams to do it. AD was a huge reason for MSFT's success | in the oughts, and still is. | | The competition completely failed to see the advantage of that | approach, and so failed to compete. At Sun Microsystems, for | example, the directory server team was very far-flung from the | Solaris Security team that owned Kerberos support, and neither | had anything to do with DNS in any Sun products, and Sun never | did anything about that in part because Solaris was seen as a | cost center while the Directory Server product was seen as a | profit center. | fuzzfactor wrote: | >How do Committees Invent? | | In many different ways throughout this seminal paper, he seems to | be saying _they don 't_. | | An important enough question raised by Conway's Law to merit the | title of the piece. | | "To the extent that an organization is not completely flexible in | its communication structure, that organization will stamp out an | image of itself in every design it produces." | | "The larger an organization is, the less flexibility it has and | the more pronounced is the phenomenon." | | Or maybe he is saying _good luck, you 've got me_ and pleading | for help. | | "philosophy promises to unearth basic questions about value of | resources and techniques of communication which will need to be | answered before our system-building technology can proceed with | confidence." | | in his final sentence. | jadbox wrote: | The only way to reduce complexity in a long running project is: | | - diligence to propoerly research the domain and provide defined | solution(s) | | - leadership with courage to make the right choice that may have | risk | | - comittment from stakeholders to fund the scope of the | initiative | | - the team's grit to see projects through to the end (and not | leave things half-refactored) | | If any of the above breaks down, you get the problem of half- | baked solutions that only end up making things worse by adding | additional complexity. | iamwil wrote: | Funny, just watched Casey Muratori cover the same topic on his | channel: https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY?t=699 | | I thought he covered it well. He considered the temporal aspect | of orgs, which meant that software, over the years not only mimic | the org, but every org that had ever been there over time. | | edit: oh, and unexpectedly, he's still around and on twitter. | https://twitter.com/conways_law | cma wrote: | Interestingly Twitter's org chart, or something, crept into | Conway's work as well, producing this tweet-unroll-as-a-pdf | communication monstrosity: | | https://melconway.com/Home/pdf/politics-emergence.pdf ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-21 23:01 UTC)