
SAFely Dancing With Conway’s law
Given at
An architectural talk for an architectural audience
Conway’s Law teaches us that systems are socio-technical systems, where system design starts long before the first line of code or even first System Context Diagram. That Organisational Design is a critical system design activity.
At the same time, Donella Meadows teaches us that we can’t control systems directly; at best, we can hope to responsively influence so that we can dance with them.
In an era of $everything-As-A-Service – and increasingly, As A MicroService – how do we design the organisation and process to successfully dance with our desired architectural patterns?
Awesome talk by @MartinBurnsSV at #itarc2015 – #agile #SAFe #ConwaysLaw #ReleaseTrains pic.twitter.com/Kgogmf2gYO
— Lars Barkman (@larsbarkman) May 21, 2015
@MartinBurnsSV wonderful stuff Martin!
— Tobbe Gyllebring (@drunkcod) May 21, 2015
This talk significantly springboards from a wonderful talk by Torbjörn Gyllebring at Lean Agile Scotland 2014. You should watch it.
- I also used some great ideas and examples from Ian Carroll:
A signal from Conway’s Law? -
The Levels of Risk assessment on slides 18-20 is from Liz Keogh‘s Capability Red thinking, well summarised at:
Estimating Complexity? -
The rapid-fire description of SAFe owes a lot to Inbar Oren‘s SAFe in 9 minutes video.