How to Verify Conway’s Law for Open Source Projects
Mariusz Кamola · IEEE Access · 2019
Conway's Law states that in successful software projects, the organizational structure of programmer teams corresponds to the architecture of the developed system. It means that, ideally, each developer team works on its software module, and only on that module. We propose an approach to assess the difference between code structure and organizational structure. It is based on agglomerative clustering of modules and developers, followed by the search for best possible mapping between the groups. We applied the approach to a number of popular open source projects. The results show that these projects hardly obey Conway's law, due to the scale-free nature of both types of deduced networks, i.e., of software modules and the developers.