I think there's a connection to be made between Conway's law, domain driven design, and building silos within an organization to reduce communication overhead between teams. Teams and project ownership should be structured so that teams have what they need to work on their own, with as little dependency on others as possible. The same thing goes for the services they're writing: data transfer and ownership within the domain is okay but should be minimized outside of it.
Previous threads discussing Conway's Law from 1, 3, 4, 5 and 7 years ago, reflecting HN's memetic structure.<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Conway%27s%20Law%20comments%3E15&sort=byDate&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a>
Probably the clearest example of Conway's Law I ever saw was when I was consulting for a dev team whose product used a complex database. They were facing a very stiff deadline, which I was there to help them achieve. Suddenly, one of the server processes started to fail, though it had been working fine up to then. After a fair amount of panic (at this point in the dev cycle pretty much anything unexpected triggered panic), the cause was found: the DBA had made a small schema change. Knowledge of the change didn't propagate to the dev team because the DBA sat on the extreme other side of the cube farm.
For a simple example with services, I manage six services that are all interconnected, but serve different groups and use cases for the company. And each time i switch the service i'm working on, it's almost like i'm putting on a different mental hat. Sure, we technically can have them in one single monolith, but i find that short mental barrier between services, even without lots of teams and developers, to be helpful.
Here I was thinking "Conway's Law" was B3/S23!<p><a href="https://slackermanz.com/wp-content/uploads/VID/CGOL_LTL_HROT/VKAutomata1531_SCALE.mp4?_=2" rel="nofollow">https://slackermanz.com/wp-content/uploads/VID/CGOL_LTL_HROT...</a>