Impact of Communication Structure on System Design: Towards a Controlled Test of Conway's Law

Conway's law is generally assumed by researchers and practitioners to hold, despite a relative lack of empirical confirmation. To better understand the effects of Conway's law on software development, we conducted a pilot study. The study consisted of a controlled experiment, in which small teams with strictly defined communication channels were tasked with designing a system. We compare the various communication structures of our experimental groups with their resulting system architectures. Due to the small scale of this pilot study, the results are inconclusive. For instance, none of the treatment groups achieved the ideal system architecture, presumably due to Conway's law, on the other hand, every treatment group's solution ended up closer to the ideal system architecture than to their organizational structure, which may contradict Conway's law. The study also reveals interesting social dynamics that may help explain the law, at least in part. Based on our findings, we hope to replicate this experiment with improved methods and a larger sample size. This report is intended as a contribution to the RESER 2013 joint replication project on Conway's law.