Domain-Driven Design Europe 2019
https://dddeurope.com – https://twitter.com/ddd_eu
Conway’s Law argues that systems designed by an organization are constrained to be copies of the communication structure of that organization. Nearly all developers have experience (too frequently bad) with the expression of this law in their own organizations.
Few realize that Conway’s Law has corollaries:
1) Designs are constrained to copy the spatial and work areas occupied by the teams developing those designs and the people using those designs once implemented.
2) Designs are constrained by the ontology (metaphysics) underlying the vocabulary and language employed by the teams developing those designs.
This talk will help attendees understand the corollaries to Conway’s Law and how to use that understanding to modify or adapt their own organizations to their advantage. Concrete examples of how the corollaries have helped and hindered projects will be shared.
Biography
David West has enjoyed a dual, parallel, career as a professional software developer and academic. His professional career started in 1968 (same year the discipline of Software Engineering was invented) as a COBOL and Assembler programmer. He has held almost every job title in the profession since then: Analyst, Architect, and even CIO.
As an academic he has created several innovative programs; introducing object-oriented development to the world’s largest software engineering program to an award winning software apprenticeship program.
His undergraduate education was in Asian Philosophy — his graduate education included an MS in Computer Science, MA in Cultural Anthropology, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science.
He is the author of Object Thinking (2006) and co-author with Rebecca Rikner of Design Thinking (2018). He has also published more than fifty papers on topics ranging from object-orientation to Agile, Patterns, Design, and Complexity.
