When designing an architecture, one should respect Conway’s law. Respecting it does not mean reversing the BAPO model, and deriving the architecture from the organization. Rather it means taking the organization and its adaptability into account when designing. Even if the architecture is perfectly aligned with business, but the architect doesn’t have the means to influence the process and the organization accordingly, there will be architectural drift caused by the mismatch with the organization.

And when we can, we try to define teams according to the architecture. Often with the premise of reducing the communication overhead in the organization, we try to break down the system into cohesive subsystems and corresponding, ideally two-pizza-sized teams. The math behind is explained simply in The Mythical Man-Month that the number of necessary communication channels grows quadratically in relation to the team size.

But, communication is essential in software development. Why do we want to reduce it?