Conway's Law: How Organizational Structure Shapes Software Architecture

Conway's Law states that "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." This principle, introduced by Melvin Conway in 1967, has profound implications for software development, particularly in the era of microservices, DevOps, and cloud-native architectures.

In this article, I will explore how organizational structures influence software design, how companies can use this law to their advantage, and best practices for aligning teams with software architecture for maximum efficiency.

What is Conway's Law?
The Impact of Conway's Law on Software Architecture

Monolithic vs. Microservices Architectures
Modular vs. Siloed Teams

Conway's Law in Modern Software Development

How Organizations Adapt to Conway’s Law
The Role of Communication Structures

DevOps and Conway's Law

How DevOps Mitigates Conway's Law Challenges
Key DevOps Practices that Address Conway’s Law

Real-World Examples

Amazon's Two-Pizza Teams
Spotify’s Squad Model

How to Leverage Conway's Law for Better Software
Conclusion
References

What is Conway's Law?

Conway's Law suggests that the way teams are structured directly impacts the architecture of the software they build. If a company has four independent development teams, they are likely to create a system with four distinct components that mirror their structure.

Key Takeaways:

Team communication structures impact software design. Effective collaboration influences modularity and maintainability.
Software mirrors organizational hierarchies. A monolithic or decentralized system often reflects the company’s internal structure.
Breaking silos is crucial for scalable architectures. Cross-team interactions foster adaptability and innovation.

Team communication structures impact software design

The Impact of Conway's Law on Software Architecture

Monolithic vs. Microservices Architectures

Understanding how organizational structures impact software design is crucial when comparing monolithic and microservices architectures. Each approach aligns with different team structures and affects scalability, maintainability, and efficiency.

Monolithic Applications

A monolithic architecture is typically developed by a centralized, tightly-coupled team, resulting in software that is highly interdependent.

Key characteristics:

Single codebase: All components are part of one large application.
Shared dependencies: Changes to one module require modifications across the entire system.
Difficult scalability: Scaling requires duplicating the whole system.

Monolithic structures often emerge in organizations with hierarchical or siloed teams, leading to slower development cycles and bottlenecks in deployment.

Microservices Architecture

Microservices promote a decentralized approach, often aligning with small, autonomous teams responsible for individual services.

Key advantages:

Independent deployments: Each service can be developed, deployed, and scaled separately.
Loosely coupled systems: Teams work in parallel, reducing dependencies.
Improved fault tolerance: Failures in one service do not impact the entire system.

Organizations adopting cross-functional teams and DevOps practices naturally move towards microservices, fostering rapid innovation and scalability.

Monolithic vs. Microservices Architectures

Modular vs. Siloed Teams

The way teams are structured within an organization directly influences software maintainability and scalability.

What Does "Siloed Team" Mean?

A siloed team refers to a team that works in isolation, with little to no communication or collaboration with other teams within an organization.

Characteristics of a Siloed Team:

❌ Isolation: Each team operates independently without sharing information.
❌ Lack of Collaboration: Decisions are made in silos, often leading to inconsistencies in processes and software.
❌ Delays and Inefficiencies: Poor communication can slow down progress and create bottlenecks.
❌ Duplicate Efforts: Teams may unknowingly repeat work that has already been done by others.
❌ Monolithic Architecture: This structure often results in monolithic systems that are difficult to modify and scale.

Siloed team

Real-World Example in Software Development

Negative Example (Siloed Teams):
The backend team develops APIs without coordinating with the frontend team, which builds the UI without fully understanding how the APIs work. This leads to integration errors, delays, and an inconsistent user experience.
Positive Example (Modular Teams):
A company adopts cross-functional teams that include backend, frontend, and QA engineers working together. This ensures that all system components are developed in sync with clear communication.

Definition of Modular Team

A modular team is a cross-functional, autonomous team that is responsible for a specific, self-contained component or service within a system. Unlike siloed teams, modular teams collaborate effectively with other teams, ensuring flexibility, scalability, and maintainability in software development.

Key Characteristics of a Modular Team:

✅ Cross-Functional Collaboration: A team consists of members with different expertise (backend, frontend, DevOps, QA) working together on a common goal.
✅ Autonomy: The team independently develops, maintains, and deploys its module or service.
✅ Clear API Contracts: Modular teams define well-structured APIs and interfaces for seamless integration with other teams.
✅ Scalability & Maintainability: Each module can be updated or scaled without impacting the entire system.
✅ Microservices-Oriented: Modular teams naturally align with microservices architecture, where each service operates independently.

Real-World Example in Software Development

In an e-commerce application, separate modular teams manage:

Order Management Service
Payment Processing Service
User Authentication Service
Each team works independently but ensures seamless integration through APIs.

Difference Between Siloed Teams and Modular Teams

Siloed Teams 🚧	Modular Teams 🔗
Teams work in isolation	Continuous communication
Rigid dependencies between components	Flexible architecture
Redundant and inefficient work	Knowledge sharing
Frequent integration issues	Synergy between development and testing
Monolithic architecture	Microservices architecture

Modular team

Conway's Law in Modern Software Development

Conway’s Law has become increasingly relevant in today’s software development landscape, where modern methodologies such as Agile, DevOps, and cloud-native architectures are shaping the way teams build and deploy applications. The fundamental premise of Conway’s Law suggests that the way teams are structured influences the way software is architected. Organizations that recognize this relationship can make strategic decisions to ensure their software architecture aligns with their business goals.

As companies scale, they must be mindful of how team interactions and communication pathways shape their systems. Large enterprises with rigid hierarchies often struggle with monolithic systems that reflect their bureaucratic structures, leading to tightly coupled applications that are difficult to modify and scale. On the other hand, companies that adopt decentralized, cross-functional teams can design loosely coupled, modular software systems that are easier to maintain and evolve.

With the shift towards cloud-native development, many organizations are restructuring their teams to better fit microservices architectures. This shift enables independent teams to own specific services, reducing dependencies and increasing agility. In contrast, companies that fail to adapt their team structures to their desired software architecture may face challenges such as inefficiencies in deployment, communication bottlenecks, and an inability to scale effectively.

By intentionally designing team structures to align with software architecture goals, organizations can optimize collaboration and innovation. The most successful companies recognize that software is not just a product of engineering decisions but also a reflection of the organization’s social and communication dynamics.

With Agile, DevOps, and cloud-native development, companies optimize team structures for software scalability and flexibility.

How Organizations Adapt to Conway’s Law

Breaking down large teams into small, autonomous units.
API-driven development to encourage modularization.
Microservices adoption to allow independent development and deployment.
Cross-functional teams with developers, testers, and operations personnel.
DevOps and CI/CD for rapid, reliable deployments.

The Role of Communication Structures

While encouraging team members to communicate more frequently can have positive effects, it is not a standalone solution for improving software quality or architectural scalability. Conway’s Law suggests that software reflects the structure of the teams that create it. If an organization has rigid hierarchies, inefficient workflows, or isolated departments, merely increasing conversation among developers will not address the fundamental issues causing low-quality software.

Effective communication structures require more than just verbal interaction; they need systemic changes in how teams collaborate. Companies must implement clear documentation practices, foster transparent decision-making, and adopt tools that facilitate smooth cross-team integration. Additionally, organizations should create an environment where knowledge sharing is actively encouraged and supported by processes that reinforce architectural best practices.

If a company develops a monolithic application and faces issues of low code quality, it is often a sign that the underlying organizational structure enforces dependencies and bottlenecks, preventing teams from working autonomously. In such cases, leadership must not only encourage communication but also restructure teams, promote modularization, and integrate DevOps methodologies to create a system that aligns with the desired software architecture.

Team communication defines software modularity:

Highly communicative teams → Loosely coupled, modular systems.
Siloed teams → Monolithic, tightly coupled systems.

DevOps and Conway's Law

How DevOps Mitigates Conway's Law Challenges

DevOps plays a crucial role in addressing the challenges posed by Conway’s Law by fostering better collaboration, automation, and continuous integration practices. Traditionally, siloed teams would develop software components in isolation, leading to monolithic architectures with tightly coupled dependencies. DevOps helps break down these silos, enabling faster, more efficient development cycles and improved software scalability.

By implementing DevOps, organizations encourage seamless communication between development and operations teams, reducing friction and bottlenecks. This alignment ensures that software architectures evolve in a way that supports agility, resilience, and maintainability. Since Conway’s Law suggests that software mirrors an organization’s structure, DevOps actively reshapes these structures by promoting cross-functional teams, blameless cultures, and iterative workflows.

The integration of automation in DevOps through Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines further enhances collaboration by minimizing manual intervention and ensuring consistent, high-quality releases. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and containerization technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker help decentralize deployment, making it easier for independent teams to work on different components of a system without causing integration issues.

In essence, DevOps provides a framework to counteract the restrictive effects of Conway’s Law by enabling more adaptable, modular software design, aligning organizational goals with technological advancements, and allowing teams to build software that is scalable and efficient.

Key DevOps Practices that Address Conway’s Law

CI/CD Pipelines: Automate testing and deployment.
Microservices Architecture: Encourages independent service development.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Reduces bottlenecks.
Blameless Culture & Feedback Loops: Ensures iterative improvements.

DevOps teams integrating CI/CD pipelines

Real-World Examples

Amazon’s Two-Pizza Teams

Amazon follows a unique approach to team structuring known as the Two-Pizza Rule, where teams should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas. This concept promotes autonomy, agility, and efficiency by ensuring that teams remain focused and independent.

Key Implications:

Loosely Coupled Microservices: Smaller teams can take full ownership of a service, making independent design, development, and deployment possible.
Faster Decision-Making: With fewer people in a team, decisions can be made more quickly, reducing bureaucratic delays.
Improved Innovation: Small teams encourage creativity and innovation since members can focus deeply on a specific set of problems.
Scalability: This approach allows Amazon to scale horizontally by adding more small teams rather than growing large, unmanageable ones.

Amazon’s Two-Pizza Teams concept

Spotify’s Squad Model

Spotify uses a Squad Model, which organizes development teams into small, cross-functional groups called squads. Each squad owns a specific feature or service and operates autonomously, deciding how to build and release their software.

Key Features:

Autonomous Teams: Each squad is responsible for the end-to-end development, testing, and maintenance of their feature.
Tribes, Chapters, and Guilds: Squads are grouped into tribes, while chapters and guilds facilitate knowledge sharing across squads.
Agile and Lean Principles: Spotify emphasizes continuous integration, deployment, and iterative development to ensure efficiency and scalability.
Scalable Organization: The model supports fast-growing companies by maintaining alignment while allowing flexibility.

How to Leverage Conway's Law for Better Software

Microservices offer a significant advantage in mitigating the negative effects of Conway's Law by allowing organizations to align their software architecture with the way teams are structured. Unlike monolithic applications, which often reflect hierarchical and siloed communication patterns, microservices enable decentralized development, fostering greater autonomy among teams. By breaking applications into smaller, independently deployable services, microservices reduce dependencies, making it easier for teams to iterate and improve their respective components without affecting the entire system.

This modularity not only enhances scalability but also improves maintainability, as each microservice can be developed, tested, and deployed independently. Additionally, microservices promote flexibility in technology choices, allowing teams to use the most appropriate tools and frameworks for their specific service. This reduces technical debt and enhances the overall quality of software. Furthermore, with the integration of DevOps practices such as continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), teams can ensure rapid and reliable updates, addressing issues faster and delivering new features more efficiently.

Organizations that adopt microservices effectively can restructure their teams into cross-functional groups responsible for end-to-end service delivery. This fosters a culture of ownership and accountability, which leads to higher code quality and improved collaboration across departments. By leveraging microservices, companies can not only align their software design with their organizational goals but also enhance innovation, adaptability, and resilience in their systems.

Best Practices:

Organize teams around business domains (Domain-Driven Design)

Structuring teams based on business capabilities ensures that software components are aligned with real-world business needs.
This approach reduces dependencies between teams and leads to more modular and maintainable architectures.

Promote autonomy and API-first design for decoupling

Autonomous teams should have full control over their services, reducing the need for cross-team coordination.
API-first design encourages teams to expose well-defined interfaces, allowing independent service evolution.

Encourage cross-functional collaboration to prevent bottlenecks

Breaking down silos between developers, testers, and operations helps improve knowledge sharing and efficiency.
Regular cross-team meetings and shared documentation foster better integration of services.

Adopt DevOps principles to facilitate smoother integration

Implementing CI/CD pipelines reduces friction in software delivery and ensures seamless deployments.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) helps maintain consistency across environments, reducing integration issues.

Embrace cloud-native architectures that support independent teams

Using containerization and serverless computing enables teams to deploy and scale services independently.
Cloud-native strategies reduce operational overhead and improve system resilience.

Conclusion

Conway's Law shapes how companies develop software. By understanding and leveraging it, organizations can create scalable, resilient, and high-performing architectures. Aligning teams with the right structure ensures efficient development and continuous innovation.

References

Conway, M. (1968). How Do Committees Invent?
Brooks, F. (1975). The Mythical Man-Month.
High-performing organization – the Amazon Two Pizza Team.
Lewis, J., & Fowler, M. (2014) – Microservices: A Definition of This New Architectural Term.
Nick Tune, Architecture Modernization: Guiding Principles for Software Evolution, Addison-Wesley, 2023
Illustrations generated with the help of OpenAI's AI.

About Me

I am passionate about IT technologies. If you’re interested in learning more or staying updated with my latest articles, feel free to connect with me on:

Feel free to reach out through any of these platforms if you have any questions!

I am excited to hear your thoughts! 👇