An Evolutionary Perspective on Socio-Technical Congruence: The Rubber Band Effect

  • Authors:
  • Stefanie Betz;Darja Šmite;Samuel Fricker;Andrew Moss;Wasif Afzal;Mikael Svahnberg;Claes Wohlin;Jürgen Börstler;Tony Gorschek

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • RESER '13 Proceedings of the 2013 3rd International Workshop on Replication in Empirical Software Engineering Research
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Conway's law assumes a strong association between the system's architecture and the organization's communication structure that designs it. In the light of contemporary software development, when many companies rely on geographically distributed teams, which often turn out to be temporarily composed and thus having an often-changing communication structure, the importance of Conway's law and its inspired work grows. In this paper, we examine empirical research related to Conway's law and its application for cross-site coordination. Based on the results obtained we conjecture that changes in the communication structure alone sooner or later trigger changes in the design structure of the software products to return the socio-technical system into the state of congruence. This is further used to formulate a concept of a rubber band effect and propose a replication study that goes beyond the original idea of Conway's law by investigating the evolution of socio-technical congruence over time.