Most engineers know Conway's Law as a quote on a slide: "Any organization that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." — Melvin Conway, "How Do Committees Invent?", Datamation, April 1968 It gets cited as folk wisdom — a clever observation, not something you would actually plan around. Then in 2008 a team at Microsoft Research and the University of Maryland decided to run the test on a real codebase that had just shipped. The codebase was Windows Vista. The result was uncomfortable enough that it should change how small teams think about architecture from day one. What they actually measured Nagappan, Murphy, and Basili built eight organizational metrics for every binary that shipped in Windows Vista. None of them looked at the code itself.…