Architecture Change: Recognizing Conway's Law

I've got lots of examples of places where Conway's Law has turned a good idea into a poor implementation. A classic is a data warehouse where there were three project managers, so they broke things up three ways, leading to a crazy mess of dumb duplication.

Countering that, I've recently look at two gutsy declarations. It takes real courage to declare an architecture wrong. Our basic human nature prevents us from acknowledging that an existing architecture is a liability, not an asset.

Pitching a fix is easy. Locating the root cause of the original problem is hard. Trying to fix a broken architecture means that you will run afoul of Conway's Law. In addition to having the guts to acknowledge that something is broken, figuring a way to work with Conway's Law is essential to success.

Broken 3-Tier Architecture

The biggest reason for broken architectures is dumb over-engineering. And most of the dumbosity has Conway's Law as its root cause. Yes, organizational structures will impose a solution structure that doesn't match the problem. There are lots of examples.

If you read too much and build too little, you find a ton of articles on .Net 3-Tier Architectures. Google and you'll get a mountain of hits, each with a distinctive spin on 3-Tier. For reference, start with this: Building an N-Tier Application in .NET. It's the party line on splitting things into tiny buckets consistent with the MS product offerings.

A "3-Tier" presentation is very seductive because it plays by Conway's Law.

• Manager A. Lobbies for Web-based solution; takes over "presentation" development and builds a team to create flashy front-end stuff with cool tools and technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Silverlight, etc. The front-end developers are as much graphic designer as programmer; they have distinct skills. Conway's Law says that since they're separate from "other" programmers, presentation must be a separate tier.
• Manager B. Manages the DBA's. DBA's must be kept separate because a database is "infrastructure", like a network and a web server. Somehow database development is usually lumped in with database administration and development competes with operation for resources. Conway's Law says that DBA's are separate so there must be a separate data tier.
• Manager C. All of the interfaces and batch loads have to be done by someone. There's no sizzle to this; it isn't fun for DBA's. It's frankly boring stuff. Another manager is assigned to create "back-end" interfaces, and other stuff. Conway's Law says that we'll introduce a "middle tier" to give these people something to contribute to the web application.

At this point, some people call "shenanigans". They say that this Conway's Law analysis is crazy talk: I'm just fitting the evidence to my theory. Here's my question? What's the alternative to the 3-tier architecture? Are they claiming that the three tiers are logically necessary?

Necessary Decomposition

If three tiers were logically necessary, we wouldn't discuss N-tier architectures.

Clearly, folks have decomposed things into more than three tiers. So, three tiers isn't necessary. It's just convenient. QED: There's no necessity to three tiers; it's just a handy team size.

Some scalability works out well with a three-tier separation. In particular, serving a lot of static content (CSS files, PNG's, static HTML) can be delegated to a front-end tier. Serving the dynamic content is better handled by a separate process (perhaps even a separate processor). Database processing -- because it's I/O bound, is often well-handled by a separate process.

However, if the "middle-tier" has a lot of work or relies on slow external web services, it might decompose into sub-tiers. No more three-tier solution. Similarly, one can make a case for splitting static content services into two sub-tiers: reverse proxy and proper content server. Again, no more three-tier solution.

Three tiers, five tiers or N tiers: the architecture could have been driven by necessity or it could be driven by Conway's Law. Clearly, Conway's Law has a profound influence. Indeed, most of the time, Conway's Law trumps all other considerations.

Otherwise we wouldn't have broken architectures. If the decisions were technical, we'd have technical spikes and we'd discard broken ideas. Instead we pursue broken ideas in that weird deadline driven project death-march.

Apostasy

One consequence of Conway's Law is Stored Procedures. That's the tier assigned to the DBA's. The idea that stored procedures might be a bad idea strikes at the very heart of all DBA's (and their managers) and is therefore unthinkable. Try suggesting that stored procedures be replaced by middle-tier application logic. Everyone says that replacing SP's with application code is heresy.

Less than two years ago I sat in a meeting where I was told, very plainly, that the only provably scalable solution was a CICS transaction server and a mainframe DB2 database. The entire room was told that web architectures were a bad idea. Only CICS could be made to work. This is just as dumb as claiming that stored procedures are essential.

This kind of thing leads to a Conway's Law Hybrid solution (CLH™) where the web front-end used SOAP web services to talk to a CICS back-end that merely invoked DB2 stored procedures. No other architecture was discussable. The architecture documentation had to be rewritten to put the simple web site into an appendix as an "alternative". The primary pitch was a hell-on-earth hybrid.

Since there was no DBA bandwidth to write all these stored procedures, the project could only be cancelled. Business rules in Java were unthinkable, heretical. As a former DBA, my suggestion to give up on stored procedures makes me apostate. Stored procedures can be driven by necessity or Conway's Law.

Conway's Law

From http://www.code-muse.com/blog/?p=7

This concept is known as Conway’s Law, named after Mel Conway, who published a paper called “How Do Committees Invent?”. Fred Brooks cited Conway’s paper in his classic “The Mythical Man Month”, and invented the name “Conway’s Law”. Here’s the definition from Conway’s own website (which also has the original paper in full):

Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law

More Broken Architectures

Another example.

• Manager A. FLEX front-end development.
• Manager B. Ontology development.

Wait, what? Ontology? No database?

Not at first. Clearly, a good ontology engine will handle the information processing needs. It will be great. The FLEX front-end can make SPARQL queries, right?

Actually, it doesn't work out well. SPARQL is slow. Hardly appropriate for a rich user interface.

So here's another pass at this.

• Manager A. FLEX front-end development.
• Manager B. Ontology development.
• No One In Particular. Backend Web Services Development between FLEX and the Ontology.

"Aha!" you say. "An example that proves Conway's Law is wrong."

Actually, this is evidence that Conway's Law can't be patched. The initial ontology-based application is entirely Conway's Law in action. Trying to create the necessary architectural features without creating a proper organization around the solution ran aground.

Calling It Quits

A really hard thing to do is call it quits when something isn't working. A fundamental law of human behavior says that we hold onto losers. Partly, this is the Endowment Effect -- once the architecture is in place, it can be salvaged. Partly, this is Loss Aversion -- declaring the old architecture broken realizes that the investment created a liability, not an asset.

How do you restart the project with a new architecture?

How do you avoid Conway's Law in the next generation of a web application?

Stay Tuned for part 2 -- Architecture Change: Breaking Conway's Law.