Laws of Software Engineering

The Team Design cluster

How to organise people for software work.

Why these together

Conway is the foundational pattern. Team Topologies puts it into practice. Brooks, Dunbar, and Ringelmann describe the cost of getting it wrong. Hackman defines what makes teams work. Surgical Team and Dynamic Reteaming are two specific configurations: a small expert team and a team that keeps reshaping. Use the cluster for any team design decision made under Conway's constraint.

• Pattern Conway's Law The shape of your software ends up matching the shape of how your teams talk to each other.
• Pattern Team Topologies Four kinds of team (working on a stream of value, building a platform, helping others, or owning something complicated). Three ways teams can interact (working together, providing a service, or helping someone learn).
• Pattern Brooks's Law Adding people to a late project makes it later.
• Pattern Dunbar's Number A person can maintain about 150 stable relationships.
• H Principle Hackman's Five Conditions for Effective Teams Teams perform when they are real teams, with compelling direction, enabling structures, supportive context, and expert coaching.
• T Pattern The Surgical Team A small team of high-talent specialists, organised around a chief programmer, outperforms a larger mixed team on coherent work.
• D Pattern Dynamic Reteaming Teams change shape over time. People join, leave, split, and merge. Treat reteaming as a normal practice.
• T Pattern The Ringelmann Effect The bigger the group working on a shared task, the less effort each person puts in.