Word.ws English Dictionary

Conway's law

Conway's law proper noun: an adage that states that organizations design computer systems that mirror their own communication structure.

Proper noun

Conway's law

  1. An adage that states that organizations design computer systems that mirror their own communication structure.
    • Recognizing Conway's Law¶ In the last several years, Mel Conway's 1967 paper “How Do Committees Invent?” has become an almost required topic in presentations about microservices as well as APIs in general.2021, Mehdi Medjaoui, Erik Wilde, Ronnie Mitra, Mike Amundsen, Continuous API Management, O'Reilly, →ISBN

Origin of Conway's law

Named after computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1967.

Questions about Conway's law

What does Conway's law mean?
Conway's law means an adage that states that organizations design computer systems that mirror their own communication structure.
What part of speech is Conway's law?
Conway's law is a proper noun.

Words near Conway's law in the dictionary

  1. Conway knot
  2. Conway knots
  3. Conway polynomial
  4. Conway polynomials
  5. Conway's constant
  6. Conway's law
  7. Conway-Alexander polynomial
  8. Conway-Alexander polynomials
  9. Conways
  10. Conwell
  11. Conwells

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Conway's law (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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