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Scoop.it!
Axway Catalyst Erik Wilde looks at how Conway’s law relates to API design and the important lessons it teaches about organizational structure and API design. 
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Scoop.it!
Treating APIs as products is a concept that is rapidly gaining adopting across the API space, and organizations are increasingly seeing the benefits of using product management principles when developing APIs. This approach involves applying the same level attention and planning to your API portfolio, as you would to any of the other software products your team is delivering.
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Scoop.it!
My conference session How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters has always drawn large crowds; on InfoQ was the third most viewed content last year. When I presented this session as an invited talk at OOPSLA 2006, I was given the opportunity to write an abstract for the proceedings. In place of an ordinary abstract I decided to try something a bit unusual: I distilled the essence of the talk down to a modest collection of pithy maxims, in the spirit of Jon Bentley's classic Bumper-Sticker Computer Science, Item 6 in his excellent book, More Programming Pearls: Confessions of a Coder (Addison-Wesley, 1988).
Mickael Ruau's insight:
Watch Presentation: How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters Joshua Bloch is Chief Java Architect at Google, author of Effective Java, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2008), and coauthor of Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases (Addison-Wesley, 2005) and Java Concurrency in Practice. He was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he led the design and implementation of numerous Java platform features including JDK 5.0 language enhancements and the Java Collections Framework. He holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon and a B.S from Columbia.
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Mel Conway formulated his famous law in 1967 and it was a reflection on how large organizations work and produce results. The “official version” (as published by Mel Conway himself) is as follows:
A more informal way of putting this may be to say that “the communication paths in an organization determine the structure of the system it designs,” or even further simplifying this that “the structure of an organization determines the structure of the system it designs.”
Either way, Conway’s law tells us that because designing complex systems is a complex task, it is inescapable that the way they are designed (looking at the design process as a collaborative task) determines the design that is being produced.
There has been some work on testing this hypothesis in the wild, but currently, there is no “scientific proof” that this law holds. However, many believe it to have some merit. Lacking formal proof, it is up to everybody to decide for themselves whether they think that the low holds. But at the very least it can serve as an inspiration and allow us to think about the interdependencies between design processes and design outcomes.