Conway's Law

In 1967 I submitted a paper called "How Do Committees Invent?" Datamation, the major IT magazine at that time, published it April 1968. Here is one form of the paper's thesis:

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

Fred Brooks cited the paper and the idea in his elegant classic "The Mythical Man-Month," calling it "Conway's Law." The name stuck.

Conway's law is a consequence of the fact that two software modules A and B cannot interface correctly with each other unless the designer and implementer of A communicates with the designer and implementer of B. Thus the interface structure of a software system necessarily will show a congruence with the social structure of the organization that produced it.

source: http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html